After 36 hours of constant development fueled by caffeine, my partners and I successfully finished a project for HooHacks 2020 — the annual hackathon hosted by the University of Virginia. We’ve developed “I Am Gonna Blur Your Mind,” an application that uses the NeuroSky Mindwave Mobile 2 electroencephalogram headset to collect brainwave data and apply video effects to a media in real-time.

Many schools provide online video classes that can be deemed stressful and hard to focus on. To tackle this problem, we connected an EEG headset to a student to investigate how to get the highest levels of focus and relaxation while a video is being played.

The headset constantly reported the student’s level of attention and relaxation throughout the video. After the observational research, we concluded that adding effects to the media when the user’s focus decreased would make the person’s attention levels go back up. We were also able to reference the user’s relaxation levels to the current volume and image being displayed in the video. With those factors in mind, we developed a web application with a video player that received the constant stream of brainwave data from the NeuroSky Mindwave Mobile 2 headset and applied video effects like a smooth blur in real-time when the user’s attention was lower than our thresholds. When the video stopped playing, the data was saved and graphed for visual analysis.

How We Built it

We used a Python script with Bluetooth to establish the connection from our EEG headset to our computer. The script would constantly write the streamed data to a file that was then read in the webserver multiple times without stopping the video with Flask Sijax requests. The webserver was created with the Flask framework in Python and the pages were designed with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The video effects were applied in real-time using the seriously.js library.

Devpost Submission

I Am Gonna Blur Your Mind

Awarded 1st Place Best Education Hack, HooHacks 2020

The Team

Nathan Kurelo Wilk

Mauricio Costa

Sebastian Hernandez