The idea of the Brainarium came from crossing of several disciplines and technical skills I built up allong past years, gathering my academical background and personnal subjects of interests. During my master degree and my Phd, I had the opportunity to start  studying a field of research I had heard off in the past and which I was really curious about, namely Neurofeedback and Brain Computer Interfaces. I could start playing with neurofeedback and BCI solutions, mainly using very basic applications as feedback elements, but this allowed me to discover the first bricks of the systems, EEG recordings, Signal Processing, Features extractions, Classification, Machine Learning...
    Since I am interested since my teenage in computer graphics, 3D modeling and animation, as well as game development and virtual reality, and as they are at the final edge of the closed loop used by neurofeedback and BCI, I did my first trials experimenting with existing OpenSource solutions for Gaming such as the amazing peace of software which Blender is. Browsing tutorials and the Blender's website I noticed there was an great plugin which allowed projection on hemispheric surfaces. So I though that would be cool to combine BCI with a kind of immersive environment. And I think this is where the idea started to arrise... On the neuroscientific part, as I was spending at the beginning a lot of time  starring and trying to understand and interpret EEG or fMRI activation or statistical maps, the analopgy between hemispherical surfaces, and more specifically fulldomes, the scalp surface or the brain, and these maps, fused into many different new ideas gathering real time or offline representation and visualisation of brain acitivity data. It appeared to me that the dome could be a nice metaphorical representation of the brain, in which we could place ourself, diving into the brain, looking up at what's recorded at the surface of the skull, or even at the surface of the cortex...and as we are at the 3D visualisation aera, why not trying doing it in stereoscopy. Of course there are many technological issues to overcome before reaching this stage.
    However the idea seemed worth trying building a first version. I looked for a formal frame to bring it to life and that's were I started collaborating with two associations from Toulouse, "Incognu" and "Les Chemins Buissonniers", and later a third one: "La ligue de l'enseignement Midi-Pyrénées"...With EEG recording devices, BCI softwares, visualization tools, hemispheric projection system and fulldome projection surface, everything was there to start stitching the whole loop...