The Peril-Sensitive sunglasses of Hitchhiker’s Guide fame directly affect the user’s response to a stimulus, turning completely opaque in response to danger. That’s a great idea, but what if sunglasses could affect your emotions? That’s what the EmotiGlass project in this year’s Hackaday Prize is doing. It’s a concept that allows a computer to change the user’s emotional perception of reality.
The key idea behind the EmotiGlass comes from a paper published by a researcher at the University of London just this year. Apparently, your emotional reaction to an image can be controlled depending on the point in time during your heartbeat cycle the image is presented. For example, researchers found the perception of pain depended on the point in the cardiac cycle the stimulus was delivered.
In an effort to test out this hypothesis with some Open Source hardware, [David Prutchi] and [Jason Meyers] created a pair of sunglasses with liquid crystal lenses that can either be clear or opaque. With the addition of ECG sensors to detect the cardiac cycle and a microcontroller to tie everything together, you get a device that is the emotional equivalent of Peril-Sensitive sunglass.
This is a great project that won $1000 for making it to the finals of the Hackaday Prize, and we’re proud to have this project in the running for the Grand Prize of $50,000 USD.
Source:: Hackaday