The Muse

Working with the muse has been an interesting experience, I have never before worked with a brainwave headset and dealing with it has been a frustrating experience. Let’s start from the beginning.

With my team we decided to work on a project we called Fashion Passion, Wear your Heart of Your Sleeve. This project was designed to take the brainwaves we can read off the Muse headset and interpret emotions from them. Of course things didn’t go as planned, the muse itself only reads in the Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta and Gamma brainwaves as well as mellow and concentration, this means that it cannot read in emotions by itself. It means that as a group we had to do a lot of experimentation with which brainwaves triggered which emotions.

                The most difficult thing to deal with though with the must was the complete lack of documentation that has been built with it. The developers of the muse created it as hardware and then put it out on the market making it free to develop for but there is no information on how to develop it. The muse seems to have been built in a way that one can only develop it if they already understand what brainwaves do what, how to read data off the muse and how to convert their custom format to be workable in code. This would not be a big problem if there was a community to develop for it but the muse development community is non-existent and therefore nobody knows how to work around issues that occur. It was one of the most frustrating experiences I have had working with a hardware device. 2/10 would not suggest developing for unless they release actual documentation on how to work with it properly.