Nirvana

What do Japanese artisans, engineers, Zen philosophy, and cuisine have in common? Simplicity and attention to detail. It is not just lazy simplicity but a sophisticated one that searches out new frontiers, always taking the object, the body and mind, or cuisine to the next level, according to ones Ikigai. The Japanese are skilled at bringing nature and technology together— not man vs nature, but rather a union of the two. Meditation generates alpha and theta brain waves right away. It may take half an hour for a beginner to experience them, these relaxing brainwaves are the ones that are activated right before we fall asleep, as we lie in the sun, or right after taking a hot bath. Nirvana is an interactive app designed to help users achieve deep meditative states by allowing them to visualize their brainwaves using an OpenBCI Ganglion board, which is an open source EEG-based Brain Computer Interface.

GUI widgets in OpenBCI are the mini tools that fit into the OpenBCI GUI’s interface panes. Examples of GUI widgets include the Time Series, the FFT widget, the Networking widget, and so on. In the upper left-hand corner of every widget, there is a dropdown menu that lists all of the available widgets. If you click the dropdown and select a new widget from the dropdown, it will replace the current widget in that window. You can rearrange the layout of the widgets by clicking the “Layout” button in the upper right-hand side of the GUI. Examples include Headplot, FFT Plot and Time Series which are displayed in the above screenshot of our OpenBCI GUI. Our Nirvana application is implemented as a widget on top of OpenBCI GUI. The OpenBCI GUI was built using Processing, a popular, Java-based creative coding framework. If you are interested in adding features or modifying the existing code, it is really easy to do so if you are familiar with Java.