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Sounak GhoshXR Designer & Creative Technologist
All work

Neuro-tech

Inner Light (BCI + VR Neurotech)

EEG biofeedback in VR: a meditating user's brainwave data drives the light of their own full-body avatar, in real time.

Exhibited at MOCDA 2022 · NYU master's thesis

Role
Creative Technologist and XR Artist
Company
Independent Research / Master's Thesis
Timeline
2022 · 9 months
Team
Solo
Platform
Oculus Rift + Emotiv EEG headset
Tools
  • BCI
  • Unity
  • C#
  • Signal Processing

What I did

  • Built the real-time EEG pipeline: Emotiv headset → Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta band data → Unity
  • Wrote a procedural wave shader whose amplitude and light emission are driven by live EEG data
  • Built a full-body IK avatar from head and controller tracking to deepen embodiment
  • Scripted the out-of-body sequence that gradually separates the viewpoint from the avatar
  • Ran user tests and documented how responses to digital dissociation diverged
Read the thesis (ProQuest)

The challenge

Make invisible neural activity something a user can see and feel: stream EEG data into Unity in real time and use it to drive a virtual body the user inhabits.

The impact

In user tests, seeing their brain activity on their own avatar gave people a strong sense of embodiment, and the out-of-body sequence split responses between freedom and unease. The work was shown at MOCDA (Museum of Contemporary Digital Art) in the 2022 Digital Summer Show and published as my NYU master's thesis.

Watch

Can We Code a Connection to the Self?

Inner Light was born from a desire to move VR beyond a purely visual medium and create an embodied extension of the body-mind as a whole. The project served as both an immersive art installation and an academic exploration into the efficacy of neurofeedback within virtual environments.

The Technical Dialogue: Brainwaves as Brushes

The design challenge was a real-time feedback loop between a user's internal state and their digital body: the user's brain activity changes the avatar, and seeing the avatar change shapes the user's state.

  • Neurotech Integration: an Emotiv EEG headset with five sensors captured brain activity, and Emotiv's software separated it into Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta frequency bands. I streamed that band data into Unity as a live signal of the user's focus and relaxation.
  • Procedural Visualization: In Unity, I developed a custom 3D avatar with a specialized wave-like shader. I programmed the amplitude and light emission of this shader to be procedurally driven by the incoming EEG data.
  • The Interface: This created a Neuro-Immersive UI where the "user interface" wasn't a menu, but the user's own virtual skin. When the user reached a state of meditative focus, the avatar’s light would stabilize and pulse in synchronicity with their neural rhythm.
  • Full Body IK Avatar: for the embodiment to be realistic and truly felt, I had to make the avatar a full-body IK system by targeting only the head and the two controllers. This heightened the sense of embodiment that users felt with this virtual body.

The Experience: From Embodiment to Dissociation

The narrative arc of Inner Light followed a specific psychological protocol designed to test the limits of digital presence.

  • Embodiment: The experience began with a guided white light meditation. Seeing their own "brainwaves" reflected in the avatar they occupied, users described feeling that the virtual body was their own.
  • Digital Dissociation: Once a stable meditative state was reached, the system initiated a programmed sequence I designed to simulate an out-of-body experience. I scripted the camera and avatar transform logic to gradually separate the user's viewpoint from the virtual form they had just inhabited.
  • The Conceptual Framework: This idea of simulating an out-of-body experience to explore consciousness was informed by research from Mel Slater at the University of Barcelona, which demonstrated that such virtual experiences can effectively reduce the fear of death.

Learnings: The Tension of the Void

During the development and testing of this experiment, I discovered that the human response to digital "detachment" is far from uniform.

I initially anticipated that the transition to an out-of-body state following a white light meditation would be an almost universally liberating feeling. While many participants did describe a sense of profound freedom and lightness, a subset of users felt a distinct sense of unease during the separation as well. This divergence brought the experiment back to its core philosophical root: the fear of dying, and how we each respond to it.

Impact & Recognition

Inner Light brought together neuroscience, contemplative practice and XR engineering. It was an exploratory study: the responses above come from user tests and participants' own descriptions, not clinical measurement.

  • Featured Artist: Presented at MOCDA (Museum of Contemporary Digital Art) during the 2022 Digital Summer Show.
  • Published as Academic Thesis in Integrated Digital Media from NYU Tandon School of Engineering in 2022. Read it here: proquest.com ↗