Technology

Web Scraping

In BrainSpace, lots of data is presented about various parts of the brain. The python library Beautiful Soup was used to gather this information. With the help of Regex, this html data was parsed to remove unwanted items like subscripts.

Oculus Rift and Muse Headband

Oculus Rift helps the user virtually interact with the human brain.

The Muse headband detects different electrical brain impulses, and gives data based on the user's state of mind. BrainSpace uses Muse to show the brain activity of user.

Myo Armband

The Myo armband allows the user to zoom and rotate the human brain. The most difficult part of implementing this was the amount of overhead in combining the Oculus Rift and Myo armband, as they both had to interact with each other smoothly.

This is just the beginning.

In its current iteration, BrainSpace allows the user to virtually view the human brain. Features include being able to select
and explore information about specific parts of the brain. BrainSpace can thus be used in education by giving students
the opportunity to view complete structures of the human anatomy in a virtual environment. With enough further
development, BrainSpace can eventually display the complete human body as well as diseases or disorders of specific
parts. This way, hospital patients can visually see, in an immersive environment, what is happening in their bodies
(as opposed to doctors trying to explain x-rays and such).


Here is a walkthrough of our project.
Please excuse the quality; we were only able to film on a cellphone (video credit: Matthew Lin):