The complete system is based on combining together an hemispheric projection system such as the one used in a planetarium, an hemispheric projection surface, and a BCI system. Various solutions can be developed depending on how much funding and materials are available, and every functional block of the system can be changed by an equivalent element. For projection, we used a transportable planetarium system which is composed of a Digitarium® Delta Portable Digital Planetarium System (http://www.digitaliseducation.com/products-digitarium_delta.html) ($30,000) and a Digitalis™ Portable Dome (http://www.digitaliseducation.com/domes.html) with a diameter of 7 meters ($12,400). However, both hemispheric projection system as well as projection surface can be made at a lesser cost using custom made tools (http://www.lss-planetariums.info/index.php). The control console was composed of a classic personal computer equipped with a dual screen graphic card and two LCD monitors. A video splitter was used to send the display signal to both a control monitor and the video projector. This can be purchased at a low cost (less than 100 dollars) on the Internet. For the EEG signal acquisition, Emotiv Epoc headset was purchased in its Research edition package in order to have access to raw data for 750 dollars (http://www.emotiv.com/store/sdk/eeg-bci/research-edition-sdk/). Except from Emotiv software suite and Mind Your OSC, the software used to do signal processing and visualisation are mostly part of the Open Source community. The freely available ( and beautifully developped ) OpenVibe software was used for signal acquisition, signal processing and visualisation of the EEG data (http://openvibe.inria.fr/). The interactive fractal video was displayed using the VVVV software (http://vvvv.org/). The 3D brain model application has been developed using Blender (http://www.blender.org/). |
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