A ‘Manfrotto modo’ tripod can be adapted into a small monopod, great for travel and taking just about anywhere. Using part of a bike lock, inner tube, tape and rubber I constructed a tripod modification to enable the tripod head to be fixed to a varying diameter of metal rails.

Just prior to the Artemis Transat race in 2008 from Plymouth, UK to Boston, US across the Atlantic I had the opportunity to spend a day sailing on one of the boats in the ‘open 40’ (forty foot) class. It was shot for use with a dome screen, so stretched over a nine meter concave screen the viewer feels like they are sat on the boat too. The idea behind dome screens AKA immersive cinemas is to give the viewer a sense of telepresence or “being there”, the screen (and footage shot) takes into account the viewers eye line, blind spots and angle of the horizon.

Artemis Transat/Plymouth Uni Promo (shot for dome screen) from james veale on Vimeo.

Photographer? Broke? Stingy? Rather do it the hard way?….. Good, that’s healthy!…probably, read on!…

Providing you have been to your local craft/arts supply store and bought:

1. Foam board

2. Gaffer tape/duct tape

3.  Scalpel

4. Meter rule (or anything with a straight flat edge)

5. Pen

6. Opaque thin paper / white large carrier bag

It is completely possible to construct this in less than an hour, maybe even faster if you use power tools instead of a scalpel. Well we may begin…

• Draw a huge “X” corner to corner using the pen and meter rule on the foam board
• How big is your flash gun/light source? Well a hole this big needs to be marked out and cut, roughly measure out the size you want the rectangular back to be, mark it, then a smaller square/rectangle for the hole in the centre where you’ll poke your flash gun through
  

• Now using the smaller square (lets call it…erm, the light hole) in the centre as a guide and the corners of the bigger square (the back), mark out out an area to cut
• Cut with scalpel  (see image below)

• Score the lines in of the bigger box, allowing the board to bend neatly
• Cut the centre hole

• Grab the gaffer tape, fold the sides… do what feels right and natural!

• Almost done… Finally it needs something to diffuse the light, opaque paper may work well, I just used the bag that the foam board came in! Put the paper/bag/or whatever on the front… duct tape it!
• DONE!

Put the flash on a tripod/table/person follow your usual wireless flash set up, start shooting (or go back to work as the hour’s probably up by now)

You could even buy two pieces of foarm board and now you have a budget reflector too!

In a nut shell:

* What: Mind controlled video installation
* Why: To Investigate human experience: symbiosis between the emotive nature of stimuli and technological quantification/adaptation, manipulating & creating new stimuli
* Where: Inside a 360 degree ‘Immersive cinema’, a concave screen also used as a planetarium. Plymouth, England.
* When: Project completed 19 June 2009
* How: Main Software = PureData + Biotrace and Python code. Technologies = Electroencephalography + other biometric ‘readers’ +Bluetooth + Networking. Hardware= Nexus device + electrodes + digital dome cinema + 2 PC’s + Photographic and video equipment + patience (limitless resource required)

Using EEG electrodes attached to one’s head the viewer can interact with an immersive video installation via brain waves and stress levels. Different video clips and audio clips play dependant on the immersants individual brain waves and stress levels.

What the Immersant is thinking or feeling is reflected in the video and sounds for other people who were inside the dome.

The Final version requires 3 instances of Pd run at the same time communicating via a local network. I have also use limiters on every single audio channel, along with delays; this helps save CPU usage and lets the project run well. One of the final (and most simple) things was reducing the pixel res by 50%… GEM seems a lot happier than when it had to cope with 1400 x 1050 video.

After going to my end of University summer ball last night, i looked around and saw allot of people who i may never see again; friends, acquaintances and friends of friends i may never meet. All quite symbolic of what has been and gone and the next stage in adulthood. Time flys when you having fun!

I’m glad someone has done this! Calls to virgin media are a guaranteed way to raise you blood pressure. My service still isn’t perfect, I’m paying for 20Meg broadband and allot of the time can barely open a web page its so slow. Although for the sake of my own sanity, acquiescence is easier than calling them up to sort it out!

I’m using a a high and low pass filter, a decibel limiter, and an fx.limiter object…all of which will hopefully protect speakers from breaking. I can’t seem to erradicate the feedback loop that occurs from having the mic on (maybe there is no solution though).

I have also been working more on the visuals. There have been various problems with running multiple videos and audio, I am now using MPEG’s and may have a way to switch the right ones off and on depending on GSR/SMR and Theta rhythms.

Now that I’ve managed to separate out the data accordingly from the python script used to make biotrace and PD communicate, i can alter colour levels. Another option is adding in other layers, to increase the meaning within the piece.

Thankfully biotrace (the software i’m using to gather biosignals) has feature that let you customize a screen, depending on your needs. The screen shot above is one i have made, that tells me what brain waves are most active at time. This is the screen im using in conjuncion with my Pure Data patch

birdsong.wav

Click image above to view notebook pages

The software to do this?… VV mic

Below is a screen shot of this software i used to convert my recording:

Its been slow progress, but progress none the less. My project now consists of a animated fish eye shot, for playback inside the Immersive Vision theatre on campus. It also successfully gathers data streams using OSC and the software Biotrace. Using these values i will be able to alter colours of the visuals, I will first record the bio sensory data from the immersant, then use this data to change the second viewing.