Thursday, January 3, 2013

Hallucination Goggles

The Laxman mind machine (link to cheesy BBC Gadget Show coverage) boasts trippy ganzfeld induced multicolor visuals.  But it's expensive ($650).

Various information for a do it yourself version are supplied on the We Alone On Earth blog, as well as interesting information on related topics like "The Origin and Properties of Flicker-Induced Geometric Phosphenes."


3 comments:

  1. you might be interested in this: http://makezine.com/10/brainwave/

    pretty sure it works similarly to the device above. is very simple, requires only an ATtiny microcontroller, some LEDs, and a AVR programmer. would probably cost about $5 for the micro and LEDs, but the programmer would be $25-50.

    dunno if you have any experience with electrical engineering, but this might be a fun weekend project.

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    1. You will probably be sorely disappointed if you build that kit. It needs extensive hacking to become a serious mind machine. I agree that the $100 Sirius is a good buy. It works better than my far more expensive Procyon. The hallucination goggles in the link are in a whole different league. Their principle of operation is based upon research into vision processing by the brain.

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  2. Thanks nea. That seems to be a DIY light and sound machine. For those that don't want DIY, a good, cheap light and sound machine I recommend is the Sirius, about $100.

    The hallucination goggles (like the Laxman) rely on the Ganzfeld effect which arises from viewing entire fields of uniform color. A full color (RGB) set of hallucination goggles with proper programming will blow away anything a light and sound machine can do.

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