The Miro Avatar | Işıl Demir, Can Şen, Yiğit Yüksel (2008)
The project originates from the desire to integrate an emotional presence into the World Wide Web. In real life, emotions are not communicated consciously; hence the idea of using EEG to collect a person’s emotions.
However, since EEG data cannot have reliable or interpretable meaning concerning any emotional state, one may only speak of collecting the ‘idea’ of one’s emotions. EEG is used to accumulate an individual’s brain signals; signals that occur each moment, unconsciously, in response to the interaction with the immediate environment. Since it was seen to be desirable to interpret these signals as the idea of one’s emotional presence in virtual reality, the three dimensional metaverse of Second Life became a natural platform to apply such a metaphor of reality.
The collection of EEG data is done by an open source program, BrainBay, which outputs the biosignal as EDF files. These files are converted to ASCII text files with another open source program, Polyman. The content of these files are integers between -4000 and 4000. The ASCII files are uploaded to a website from which custom made scripts in LSL read the files that contain the EEG data.
The avatar changes according to incoming brain wave. When the avatar is activated the script begins reading data from the server and a change in the shape of the avatar according to the incoming integer values is brought about. Thus the user's brain waves form a virtual manifestation that represents his/her virtual appearance which can also be considered as a metaphor for the representation of one's mind; since, figuratively, what is thus visualized are the person's ‘thoughts.’
As far as the creative process is concerned, the visualization of one’s emotional presence has been inspired by the idea of the four dimensional painting which Miró proposed in his later years. Thus, the avatar, composed of the various visual elements featured in Miró’s paintings, continuously changes its shape and is redrawn, transcending the two and three dimensionality of painting and sculpture. As expected, this representation stands in contradiction to the prevalent tendencies of metaverse and MMORPG players who, will either create accurate physical reflections of themselves by making an avatar corresponding to their actual appearance or conversely by giving the avatar physical traits to which they aspire to in real life, but which are entirely out of their reach in the physical realm.
As a general rule three dimensional virtual spaces tend to be simulations of real spaces and as such they can solely be interacted with and experienced through mental processes which are the visual, auditory, and cognitive stimulations in the brain. So, instead of creating an avatar based on actual physical traits, the output of the project offers to create an alternative visual entity, usable as an avatar, derived from the fact that users cannot have a real physical presence in virtual spaces and the fact that their mental input is the only factor that creates the illusion of presence in a virtual space. Other users can ‘see’ them, not because they are physically there; but because there is an avatar that is shaped via their thoughts and desires with which one may interact in a manner similar to face-on-face physical interaction. Thus it may be concluded that, in terms of representation, virtual appearance may well rely on the output of unconscious thoughts, which are what is also mirrored in the surrealist approach of Miró’s paintings.
The project was published in the proceedings of the "Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality," Conference, 2009. Read the paper here.
