Alan Dunning
alan.dunning@acad.ab.ca
Media Arts & Digital Technologies, Alberta College of Art and Design, Calgary, Canada
einsteins-brain-project@home.com

Paul Woodrow
ebp@home.com
Art Department, University of Calgary, Canada

  An almost empty room is peopled by participants wearing head mounted displays moving strangely and ungoverned by any expected interactions with the immediate world. Although they are clearly alone they are apparently interacting with unseen agents and responding to invisible forces.

A workstation is connected to 6DOF trackers and HMDs with transmissive optics. The HMds contain electrodes that read the brainwaves from both the left and right hemispheres of the participant. A simulation programme (EONReality) generates a virtual environment that contains visual equivalents of a participant's EEG output that is superimposed on the real world in real time. By moving through the real space participants are able to navigate the virtual world and can manipulate data and objects within the virtual world. Objects are animated and exhibit various behaviours and responses to a participant's presence and EEG output.

To a participant computer generated images appear in the room and may be manipulated and interacted with as if they were actual objects and occurrences. To a viewer the participant exhibits a peculiar behaviour, conversing with invisible personages and taking part in unseen events. The resulting engagement present participants as religious visionaries or as schizophrenics immersed in some consensual hallucination, engaging with invisible agencies and powers as yet unknown to an observer.