isabella232 / project-captivate

Glasses project for crowds

Project Captivate

A Wearable Platform for Across-Context Measurement and Actuation

Across Contexts

Project Captivate have been designed to serve as an easy and reliable platform to measure physiology in the real world. We've designed it to be a tool for researchers, a means to understand attention and engagement, and a scalable means to control responsive ecosystems.

A Tool for Researchers

Smartglasses are increasingly popular because the face is an ideal location for continuous monitoring of environmental and physiological signals. Unfortunately, no standard smartglasses platforms offer easy access to physiological data. That leaves researchers constrained by their own quick—and usually bulky—designs that make people self-conscious and uncomfortable, altering their behavior and preventing long-term naturalistic studies.The Captivate platform addresses these concerns; it saves researchers design time and gives them easy access to data in a form factor that doesn't stand out.We spent a summer in Shenzhen, China, learning from eyeglass manufacturers on how best to integrate sensors that track physiology events across your face, head movements, and location in a form-factor that is similar to a traditional pair of glasses.

Measuring Attention Across Contexts

We are using the Captivate platform study a user’s cognitive state, specifically cognitive loading and overall attention. Many lab-based behavioral studies fail to replicate in real-world contexts. Because of the deep engineering work behind these glasses, we are capable of studying people naturally—all day long, in their real lives. Combined with new probabilistic modeling tools, we can make much more reliable predictions about a user's cognitive state in real scenarios.

Driving IoT Ecosystems at Scale

The glasses also talk to each other over a mesh network, allowing them to scale to large events and concerts, as well as to serve as one integral part of IoT ecosystems at home and at work. We envision the insights Captivate glasses can capture about users in these environments as a crucial first step towards responsive, immersive environments that support user goals.