Holo Flower Brain
Give invisible signals a living form.
Holo Flower Brain turns live EEG signals into a responsive flower. As research lead, I shaped the interaction and visual system, connecting a brain-sensing headband to a Unity-powered experience and a holographic display.
The design question was how to make an unfamiliar stream of data feel observable and personal. I explored a living form that people could watch change, alongside trained commands that let them rotate and lift it.
Developed at Harvard in 2019.
- Role
- Research Lead
- Responsibilities
- Interaction design, EEG-to-form mapping, visual development, Unity implementation, and iterative testing.
- Platform
- Collaboration with Emotiv EEG Headband 2019
A living form for live signals.
I mapped 14 EEG streams to the central lines of individual petals. This gave the changing form a repeatable structure: each channel had a place in the flower, rather than driving an arbitrary visual effect.
The flower became both a designed object and a responsive surface. The challenge was to preserve its identity while allowing the incoming data to deform it.
Signal → structure
Form → projection
One responsive form.
Four orientations.
- Source
- Deformed flower mesh
- Layout
- Radial arrangement
- Display
- Holographic pyramid
01020304Separate the signal from the command.
Continuous EEG input deforms the petals. Trained mental commands rotate and lift the flower. Keeping these behaviors distinct created two interaction paths: observing an incoming signal and intentionally changing the object.
I connected incoming values to the mesh through pressure-based deformation, then made the force adjustable to tune the response. The recordings show rotation and deformation alongside the adjustable-force iteration, keeping the flower’s form and behavior connected throughout testing.
HOLO / Brain interface
EEG input
Illustrative signals
Spatial response
From response to understanding.
A facial-expression test produced a strong visual response. That observation exposed the next design challenge: a changing form can make a signal perceptible, but people still need a way to understand what caused the change.
The system established the sensing-to-form loop. The next step would be to test how people distinguish passive signal changes from intentional commands, and which feedback helps them learn that relationship.
Pair the signal with lived experience.
The research connected two scales of experience: live EEG feedback and a person’s longer-term account of sleep and dreaming. Holo Flower made the signal visible; Dream BCI explored the personal context around it.
The research included 102 survey responses and 10 follow-up interviews. Participants wanted more than a daily data report: they wanted patterns over time, flexible ways to record dreams, and reliable saving and export.
This led to a personal profile combining measured signals with self-reported context. The survey and sample-journal analysis below formed part of the same research.