ID#8 Hesed

ID Engines::Hesed

[Engine #08]

ABSTRACT

With the Hesed engine, you can live out an out-of-body experience and swim in the stream of time, through the power of your mind.

The time which concerned is not the time of physicists, but rather the time of philosophers, the existential time in which human perception is rooted. We have a grasp of what we percieve as „past“ and what as „future“. The present, the very moment of now, is just a volatile and fleeting glimpse, shifting, dying and reborning with each new now in the flow of time. It is a floating, shifting, invisible edge, sharper than a razor-blade. It is a delicate membrane between the past and future, the spot where all miracles of human life happen.

The Hesed engine takes a hold of this membrane and grows volume out of the void. It can be seen as a hip philosophical tool for the questioning and exploration of the nature of time. You can expand your existencial presence, inflate the delicate bubble of the here and now, make a step on a journey towards infinity and eternity. Hesed can be as well used as a tool for dynamic meditation, one with a digital twist.

CONCEPT

Hesed is a mixed reality installation, driven by brainscan (EEG) input.

Installation setup

The player’s appearance is scanned in real-time by a camera, digitally processed and inserted into a virtual reality world. Not only the current frame, but a whole sequence of frames from the video stream is displayed at the same time, organized into a three dimensional structure.

Frames to volume

Wireframe model of the VR world

The cylinder structure is the place where the frames are spooled. Each individual frame is just a two dimensional sheet, but together they form a structure with a volume, an object in virtual reality where the third dimension is time.

Screenshots (raw)

The player can control the volume of this structure (the amount of frames which are used at any given moment to render it) through brainwaves. The EEG interface scans for alpha waves in a given area of the player’s brain. The more the player dives deeper to alpha, the wider span of time is used to create the volume. The membrane of here and now gets gently inflated with the power of the mind.

Real-time image pre- and postprocessing can be deployed to achive more trance-like effects:

Screenshots (w/ image preprocessing)