Sound, Image and the Brain: Cognitive Live-Arts Technology in Contemporary Game-Oriented and Accessibility Paradigms.

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As a result of the ever-decreasing cost and increasing efficiency of contemporary consumer hardware and software, advanced audiovisual technologies are now commonplace, even in mobile telecommunications devices. Carefully designed products and services, such as the Netbook and the iPhone, exemplify modern transformations in the contemporary technoculture, providing not just new technology, but more importantly, new economic and social infrastructures by which we engage with audiovisual experience and beyond. These devices continue to offer fresh opportunities for and challenges to the way we perceive our everyday life, augmenting our understanding of the world around us, by delivering information to us at high speeds, and in increasingly intuitive ways. This is to some extent enabled by developments in human computer interface research. Interface technologies that until now have been too expensive or too complex for mass production are being prototyped and deployed as part of new consumer devices. Amongst these devices are touch screen or 'surface' interfaces (of which the iPhone is the key example), miniature camera / projection based systems that deploy computer vision and machine listening, such as Microsoft's project Natal and MIT's Sixth Sense, and consumer grade brain-computer interfaces, such as Emotiv systems Epoch, and Neurosky's Mindset Electroencephalograph device.These developments have captured the imagination of the public, perpetuating a narrative of the technological extension of humanity. Researchers exploring new directions for interface technology support this extension through terminology such as 'augmented reality' and 'sixth sense technology'. Importantly, what this revolution also brings is the capacity for technology to enhance the lives of those whose experience of everyday life is very different to that of the majority, augmenting sensory experience and capacity in an interesting and highly fertile way. Most significantly, rather than restricting the potential dissemination routes for the application of these technologies, collaboration with those whose sensory experience is different and/or unique continues to add huge value and impact to the refinement of these approaches, allowing lessons learned in less common situations to be deployed in more general scenarios, and vice versa. For example, brain-computer interface technology is of great potential value to those with limited mobility, cognitive impairment or other form of disability, and its use in these environments will continue to reveal the extent to which it is becoming generally applicable.Through a multidisciplinary approach that draws on perception and cognition, media engineering, therapy, interactive gaming, sound, music and audiovisual arts, this proposal aims to take completed research in brain-computer interfaces, audio-visualisation, participation and gaming, and develop it in partnership with industry and public organisations in order that it might reach its full potential in terms of social and economic impact, by engaging more fully with those within the public sector who both stand to benefit from, and also contribute to the creation and enhancement of consumer-grade real-time interaction hardware and software for brain-computer interfacing and technology-led creativity.