Description
In 2021, the five of us created a simple, yet so cute and interesting game as part of the BR41N.IO Brain-Computer Interface Design Hackathon, and more specifically the Spring school.
Brain-Computer Interface or BCI for short is such an interesting thing. The first time I heard about it was years ago, in fact it was 2009, when I was at the Canadian Film Centre as part of the Media Lab Telus Interactive Art & Entertainment Program. We wen to visit the lab, there we played a fun game with our mind. The game looked similar to Star Treck’s game with the flute, where you have to put a disk inside a cone. In the show, The Game was played by wearing special glasses and everyone became addicted to it, it turned out that was on purpose, because that’s how “the bad guys” controlled the crew. In my “real” experience the game was actually really fun, there were no bad guys, there was none controlling anyone, except your own mind controlling the little disk, and it wasn’t actually conscious control, the way to win was to relax. Relaxing funny enough produces different brain waves and we could detect those. I distinctly remember some of my classmates being really good at the game and some not – my first time realizing how different people are in that regard – very obvious now that we have way more information about these subjects. It was such a cool project!
The second time I head about it was when I signed up for a webinar about wearable devices and the presenter was Anouk Wipprecht, who is a super cool designer and innovator, educator and engineer, combining fashion and interaction design, microcontrollers, engineering, science… Her work is amazing, and one of the project she mentioned was Agent Unicorn project, which is a beautiful, fashionable BCI headset, created for children with ADHD or autism. The talk was so inspiring and somehow I found myself at the BR41N.IO hackathon website.
I wanted to learn everything – the BCI & Neurotechnology Spring School whole event was ten days and was full of lectures and presentations about neuroscience, BCI motor and stroke rehabilitation, brain stimulation, functional brain mapping, life sciences, engineering…
I knew nothing of those fields, but I knew how to make games in Unity, and there it was – the Unity game BCI category.
It’s so cool to work with people in different fields, and with people in vastly different fileds than yours – the things you learn from each other, the projects you create together, it’s like nothing that has been done before. For a long time I thought people always did projects like this, since while I was in OCAD, I was working as a research assistant for MDCN – which was the Mobile Digital Commons Network – this was an interdisciplinary collaboration between so many universities across Canada, we explored, researched and created multiple projects, which had to do with mobile devices and interactivity, creativity and storytelling. Think of the mobile phones we had then – my little Nokia E51 with actual buttons, that was so tiny and fit perfectly in my pocket. It had an aluminum shell and was heavier than other phones, but I still remember how much I loved it. So what we did was pretty innovative and a time and we created things that would have been different if we didn’t collaborate within all these fields. Unfortunately it was so long ago and a few of the related websites keep disappearing as time goes by – there were so many people working together and so many projects. But I managed to find some of the work, one is a paper by my mentor at the time Martha Ladly – Park Walk. You could guess who did the cute dog graphics and interface design. I also found Paula Gardner and Geoffrey Sheas projects, you could see some of them here. Again, guess who did the funky-human flash animations. I loved my whole time working in that environment.
So I was so excited about this hackathon, and couldn’t wait for that email to see if I will be a part of a team! And it happened! It is so exciting jumping into an unknown territory and seeing how things are, how you would manage and in this case how and what we could create together.
Long story short, it was so much fun. You can actually see how happy I am on the screenshot during one of our working calls in the video.
I created this little Unity game of a what I call “Sweet Octopus” which was a cute, hungry creature, trying to capture some fish, except the fish belong to some humans. A multiplayer gameWhoever player manages to first direct the octopus towards one human rather than the other, gets the pleasure to be eaten and make the octopus very happy.
The rest of my team worked so hard on absolutely everything else, all the BCI technology, putting it together and so on. Unfortunately it was a virtual hackaton, because I would’ve loved actually being there and seeing how they did things, how it all worked and was developed in real life. Though it was also actually wonderful that it was virtual, because I don’t think I could’ve just flown to a different country on a whim and be able to participate.
We won third place in the Multiplay category. It was so much fun and such a wonderful experience, and my teammates were incredible!
Our team was Artem Gazizov, Harshwardhan Saini, myself, Vadim Juris, Karahan Yilmazer and Vladislav Samoilov.
There is so much backstory to everything we do, sometimes unintentional, random and lucky events that turn into experiences and shape our lives, thinking and view of the world. Parts of it we can control and parts of them we can’t and that’s just how things are. I enjoy those unexpected moments and especially in creativity, letting them come, exploring them, following them, then not if you don’t like them and trying something else. It is fun to write about them, follow the tread, and look at them as a whole, connecting the dots. Treasures.
