Mindful Manifestation: From EEG to Virtual Reality

Throughout millennia, the human mind has been attributed to the advancements of human society today. Architecture, likewise, a result of human wit and intelligence. This research takes a particular interest in the architecture that is, pre-conceived before its existence. From the inception of this research, it began with a particular interest in this design process, or creative. The objective, to develop a means for people to design using their mental imagination. The objective, while novel and realistic, demonstrate itself to be highly challenging in its enormous complexity. The investigation focuses now settles towards the development of an “integrated foundational” brain-computer interface (BCI) to design architecture through meaningful and intentional design interactions through human brain activities in real-time inside an immersive virtual environment.  The research methodology deploys the conglomeration of the following of hardware:  • 14-Channel EPOC+ electroencephalograph (EEG) headset (a brain electrical activity detector) • High-end computer with VR capable graphics card • HTC Vive Virtual Reality (VR) Headset  In terms of software, CortexUI, a cloud-based platform to stream live EEG data, Grasshopper (GH), a commonly used architectural visual scripting plugin software, followed by Unity, a commonly used tool to develop interactive VR/3D environment. The user shall be wearing both EEG and the HMD to interactive with the presented material.  The EEG is used to detect brain activities through its electrodes measuring variation in of electrical potential caused by passing signals sent within the brain’s neurons. These raw data are transferred into Grasshopper in numerical forms, where these data are inputs to manipulate a series of pre-defined forms and interactions in Grasshopper, a plugin in Rhino software. The translation process involved data manipulation for desired design interaction, which altered the abstracted formal qualities of locations, scales, rotations, geometries and colours, with a minor implementation of certain artificial neural networks (ANN) within a design environment context. Virtual Reality consequently performs as a visualisation tool and immersing the user within that design interaction as well as become a design feedback tool. The user is stimulated to generate various design variations and able to capture that result in Rhino through baking the design in Grasshopper. The exported geometries act as an abstracted visualisation of the BCI system’s user’s mental state at that point in time.  The research outcome exceeded the aims & objectives from its “foundational” status in its ability to harbour multiple design interactive scenarios. However, there are considerable technical limitations and room for future research within this experiment, all of which shall be mentioned within the discussion section of this inquiry. A technical understanding and overall framework have been developed as a result of this study, tending towards creating a BCI-VR system to design architecture directly from the human imagination from the mind’s eye.