Team Syneseizure - Seeing with vibrators in your face!

We are Team Syneseizure!
We are unmasking reality.

(crowd laughs)

So we don't see reality, we don't see this,
reality is far too complex.

There's way too much information in it.

So what happens is that reality gets massively compressed..

and filtered before we see it.

So our 'hack' aims to go from this 'filtered reality'

back to 'real reality' in some way.

So how are we going to do that?

So, usually we have various sensory inputs..

sight goes to vision,
olfactory goes to the nose for example.

And what we want to do is
we want to hack that.

We want to send the sensory input
to the wrong sense.

And the reason for that is
we want to try to confuse our system,

we want to get around the normal data
filtering algorythms in our visual cortex.

So how are we going to do that?

We chose to use visual input and send that to our sense of touch.

Why? Because it was fairly intuitive,

The visual input is an array of pixels,

and you can imagine in this example
how it can be mapped to tactile.

So.. we implemented this,
we thought about various different ways,

the linear actuaters were too expensive,

these vibrators were way too expensive,
(crowd laughs)

BUT, it turns out that you can use small speakers as vibraters

and they're like 60 cents each.

So, here's our design.
We take a webcam for visual input,

that puts out an array of numbers
that goes into an Arduino,

and drives an array of vibrators
that we put into your sense of touch.

Where did we put it?

We put it in your face!

Why? Because your face is
a great place to put the sense of touch,

As illustrated by Homonculus.

So, our sartorial concepts came from

A fetish leather patterns journal

And we implemented this.

Here it is, the original design
and implementing it,

And now we will show you a demonstration

of Team Syneseizure.

So, we're now plugging in the USB port,

to get the video webcam
to communicate with

these 16 vibrators
attached to parts of his face.

Ok now, who can see it?

You can see on the computer screen

the pixel images that are being compressed

from the webcam input,

is giving us a very simple visual stimulus,

And now Bob is going to tell us,
more or less,

where he's feeling that on his face.

So you can see now there's a visual input

that's coming into the webcam,

and he feels it, in his face!
(crowd laughs)

He's Synesthesic!
(applause)

He can see reality with no filter!

(applause)

And that is Team Syneseizure,
Thank you.

(applause)