Editing films with brainwaves

Imagine being able to watch a film edited exclusively according to your brainwaves. For Richard Ramchurn, a student at the University of Nottingham in England, this is already possible. Last week, he held an initial demonstration for a small audience who used a $100 headset to map their brain's electrical activity.

Although the science behind interpreting brainwaves is not yet entirely precise, Ramchurn is already able to use current insights to edit a film in real time based on the captured neural activity of an audience member. Everything in the film The Moment can be edited: scenes, soundtrack, or animation.

With a 27-minute runtime, the film explores a future where brain-machine interfaces are part of people's daily lives. In sessions with six to eight people, Ramchurn allowed only one of them to control what the others were seeing through interaction with the headset. In June, however, he is expected to hold the same demonstration in a larger setting at a film festival in Sheffield.

Using a MindWave headset from Neurosky, it is possible to map the attention level of the wearer based on their brain's electrical activity while watching Ramchurn's film. These results are then processed on a laptop continuously connected to the reading device, running software specifically programmed to edit the scenes in real time, without the need to move a muscle.

However, one of the questions raised is whether this experience would truly be interesting for collective screenings. While virtual reality narratives can only be experienced individually and then discussed in a group, Ramchurn's invention might also be more rewarding if done in isolation.

Or if, one day, more people or the entire audience could wear the headset and an average of the generated insights could feed the editing software, we might then have a new real-time result of what the film industry invests so much in when hiring editors: more than just audience research, it is the audience itself that shapes the product they want to receive (consciously or unconsciously) based on the mapping of their brainwaves.

Something similar has been tested before by other film projects that involved audience participation via mobile apps that were meant to be used while watching the film. In the 90s, there was even an experiment where the audience used a joystick to choose between two different endings for the film—the same applies to the old system of the TV Globo show Você Decide.

For Jacob Gaboury, an assistant professor at the University of California, this type of technology gives film directors the opportunity to not necessarily be forced to follow the same logic when telling stories, but to take advantage of other narrative possibilities that can be chosen by the audience at the moment of viewing.

To him, more than an average of the insights generated by the entire audience, the most interesting application for this type of technology developed by Richard Ramchurn would be a collaborative experience, where each person is responsible for taking care of one element of the film: the soundtrack, the editing, the special effects, etc.

The film's trailer can be viewed below: