CMU School of Drama


Thursday, July 18, 2013

Building a 15-foot-tall brain-controlled brain for Burning Man and beyond

Boing Boing: My cousin Katherine Leipper is part of a crew that's building a 15-foot-tall head and brain with interactive light and flame effects that will be controlled by a participant's brain waves. Yup. Weirdness runs in our family. She and her co-makers will take it to Burning Man, but the bigger plan is to take it around to schools after the festival, "to get kids excited about science, technology and fabrication."

3 comments:

Will Parsons said...

This is something that you certainly don't see every day! The wide variety of materials and colors that can be acquired through this project is very cool and also the fact that it uses a participant's mind in order to trigger certain lights is really mind blowing (ha ha ha). This is a great step forward in the technological world and hopefully more inventions like this can be seen in the future on a more practical scale.

Unknown said...

This is just too crazy. The human brain and how it works is just over my head. I don't understand how discoveries like these are made, let alone amplified and recreated into a 15 foot structure. Apparently all you have to do is put a device on your head and it will read your brain waves. How does that work!? How can you possibly create a device that can read and project your brain waves? I am convinced that in the next 30 years there will be machines with mind reading capabilities. We really live in some unbelievable times.

Unknown said...

The approach to this project is very interesting! To be able to bring a live feed of the brain to the performance opens up numerous opportunities for educational theatre to take. The field of neuroscience and neuro-medicine is growing and growing. And for kids to be able to start to see that early and in a very visual way is extremely beneficial to teachers and to students. In addition to creating a structure with great technology, they have also created a very beautiful structure with creative colored lighting and unique structural design.