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Saturday, May 15, 2010

Biometric Social Interaction @ Thoughtmade

GeekPhysical attended Thoughtmade, a gathering of creative innovators at a culture nightclub (Inkonst) in Malmo, Sweden. We presented ourselves, and our thoughts on pushing the amazing stuff going on in the Oresund region (Copenhagen & Malmo) out into the world and encouraged people to start exploring, tinkering, and making things! We had a fabulous time and are very happy to be part of such an important movement. www.thoughtmade.com

Friday, February 5, 2010

"Cold Feet" bouquet goes to Brazil, and on TV!

GeekPhysical's Interactive Wedding Bouquet, "Cold Feet" has premiered on Brazilian TV on their biggest daily television show, Mais Voce!

We lent the bouquet to a set of Wedding fairs in Brazil, "Bridal & Fashion Expo, the largest fair of marriages in Brazil, which has been operating for 16 years" and have been featured on TV!

You can see the show here although it's in Portuguese. It starts talking about the bouquet at about 3:35.

Text below roughly translates as:

* Bouquet shows humor of the Bride: Bridal Expo & Business, in partnership with GeekPhysical of Denmark, brought this issue with a uniquely innovative and unusual bouquet. Called Galvanic Skin Response Bouquet, the bouquet has LEDs that light up as the mood of the bride at the altar. If it's calm, he turns blue. In her case be nervous at the altar, the light emitted is white. This is possible because two sensors are connected to the bride to measure heart rate and body temperature. All data is stored in a memory card of 1 GB.

Thank you Yris!

Friday, January 15, 2010

BioMapping with GSR

We found this fantastic piece by "Christian Nold, a London-based artist, used GPS coordinates coupled with a device that measured participant’s galvanic skin response as they walked through a designated urban area."See Biomapping site here

As much as we're interested in facilitating biometric SOCIAL interaction, we think its really interesting to think about how "emotional location data" (as Nold terms it) could set the stage for places within a city. Perhaps one is looking for an area where high emotions exist, you could find areas of high excitement, of frustration, of peacefulness, and depending on your goal (avoiding frustration while driving) you could plan your route, or even your social interactions with this concept. Imagine you’re looking to socially interact with others so you visit the high excitement area and find like-minded people interested in discussing and playing with biometric responses. It could be a fantastic venue, even if it’s just a street corner, well known for its emotional qualities.

Since we also like to explore proximity and heart rate, we wonder what happens if these elements are added to Biomapping - perhaps people can see when they were most exerted during the day (a long walk to work in heels?) or where both their emotions and heart rate peaked, perhaps an encounter with a friend, in which case, the proximity sensor would be of interesting note. Some fun thoughts to consider!

Nice work Mr. Nold we look forward to hearing more about this!

Monday, January 11, 2010

Project Cold Feet


GSR Bouquet
Originally uploaded by geekphysical
So this was written a day before the wedding, but now two days after the wedding, I am finally able to post it! Enjoy!

The couple (who met creating a critical corset that tightens when the wearer's heart rate goes up) have decided to take the leap and get married! We of course love biometrics and geekery and thus have decided that our wedding needs to be equally geeky. We've been working hard on taking our biometrics project into a new realm, detecting wedding emotions and datalogging the entire day.

We're able to see at a glance, if the bride gets cold feet, or is just very excited by her bouquet. The bouquet is implanted with fibre optics, lit by two bright LEDs, one blue, one white. The LEDs show changes in Galvanic Skin Response. As emotion swings from relaxed (blue) to alert (white) the fibre optics will gently glow and the bouquet will display the colors accordingly. The bouquet will be composed of all white flowers, lilies and orchids to make sure that the lights are visible.

At the same time, heart rate is recorded for both bride and groom on the datalogger.

The datalogger, from Sparkfun, a "LogoMagic 2" is recording analog signal directly on to a 1GB SD card. The analog signal it's getting is both the heart rate signal from an optical heart rate sensor (see our post here about this - http://geekphysicalbiometrics.blogspot.com/2009/09/designing-glove.html) and the data from Galvanic Skin Response - GSR - (read, emotional state) measured from two electrodes touching the skin. The heart rate optical measure, an LED and a photo transistor and the two electrodes for the GSR are housed in a velcro strap that sits, most appropriately, on the wearer's ring finger. It could of course be on any finger, but this is simply the most fun.

The bride holds the bouquet and has the 'ring' on her left hand ring finger. The datalogger is housed in the base of the bouquet with the wire wrapped around the bouquet base so she slides her finger into the ring and holds on to the bouquet all at the same time. The groom has his datalogger on his wrist, held in place by a wrist band, under his tuxedo arm.

Data can be recorded on the 1GB SD card for up to 15 days but we'll just be recording the one, from morning until the late hours of the night.

We've also placed proximity sensors (using infrared) on the two dataloggers so we can see how many times throughout the day we're side by side, or far apart.


Many more photos coming as soon as we pick up the bouquet, in the meantime, check these out!


Video! Blip.tv: http://blip.tv/file/3082759 OR youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k89BoX2AxhM

"Undercover"
by Citizen Nyx





SCHEMATIC for GSR & HR: http://jump.fm/VXDTG

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Festival della Creativita


IMG_5440
Originally uploaded by geekphysical
Our first test run after setting up our exhibition at Festival della Creativita. Everyone looked cool in their shades hooked up with IR gaze detection, and followed their heart beat and GSR streams flowing from one person to another. The festival begins today and its been a hard two days getting this booth in order! We're doing the last touches of tweaking the program and locking everything down (theft is popular in Italy!). We have some great neighbors - check out their video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGvwP4QyLcA and another neighbor who is specializing in projecting interactive graffiti! (http://tangibleinteraction.com/)

Thursday, October 8, 2009

BSI - Hardware

The hardware is complete! A victory after three weeks of working insanely hard (well one of us working insanely hard and the other being an excellent non-hardware expert kinda cheerleader).
A quick rundown of what's in the photo:
Sunglasses have infrared sensor/receiver. Finger hold has galvanic skin response sensor and heart rate sensor. All cased within a sexy black box!

Participants will place the finger sensor on their index finger, and it will receive heart rate/galvanic skin response data and the sunglasses have an IR sensor so when people look at each other, it registers.

Hardware built, some much appreciated help from our friend Jonas (check out his site: http://www.halfdanj.dk/) on the software and away we go! .... well soon. A few more things to be done first. But then we go! :) Festival della Creativita here we come!