Neurochat: Artistic Affective State Facial Filters in Online Video Communication.

This paper describes “Neurochat”, a novel artistic Brain Computer Interface (aBCI) application that allows users to explore the combination of art and brain activity in a live online chat experience. This new interaction method enables users to video-chat online while expressing themselves using artistic facial filters that represent their real-time affective state, generated from electroencephalogram (EEG) brain activity from a mobile EEG headset. This paper discusses motivations for creating such an application by giving an overview of the current state of the art in aBCI. It also discusses the architecture of the created system, including the associated application components, application flow, design of facial filters with the descriptions of their associated affective state, and classification method that was used. Additionally, a preliminary user study was conducted to investigate the effect of the application combined with an existing online video-chatting method, Google Hangouts, to gain insight on user perspective towards the system.