Market Street now looks a little more like that planet from Avatar because of new installation from Ashley Newton: mind-controlled robotic flowers called "NeuroFlowers" that open, close, and change color all based on an EEG-studded headset monitoring your brain activity. As Newton explains, relaxing or focusing will cause changes to the flowers, externalizing your brain activity so that you can see it in a new way.
NeuroFlowers is an interactive biofeedback-based art piece. Using EEG to read electrical currents from the surface of the head, we can determine different mental states, which then guide the behavior of illumino-kinetic magic flowers.
The occasion for the installation is The Market Street Prototyping Festival, where other projects include memorials to lost SF waterways or arroyos, crazy public ping pong tables including one with six-sides, and a giant typewriter sculpture in honor of SF journalist Herb Caen.
You can see all the projects until tomorrow (Saturday) evening: The schedule is here and the list of projects is here. If you like an idea, because this is democracy in 2015, you can share your opinion with a hashtag to help a prototype blossom into a permanent installation.
Previously: Market Street Project To Remember Forgotten Waterways