The project is called CEEDS — aka Collective Experience of Empathetic Data Systems — and involves a consortium of 16 different research partners across nine European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK. The “immersive multi-modal environment” where the data sets are displayed, as pictured above — called an eXperience Induction Machine (XIM) — is located at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona.
On the cognition enhancement side, the system can apparently respond to the viewer’s engagement and stress levels by guiding them to areas of data that are potentially more interesting to them, based on tracking their physiological signals and signposting them to click through to particular parts of a data set.
Again, the core concept driving the research is that as data sets become more complex new tools are required to help us navigate and pin down the bits and bytes we do want to lock on to. Potential use cases envisaged for the XIM technology include helping students study more efficiently.
Early interest in the tech is coming from museums, with the XIM concept offering a way to provide museum visitors with a personalised interactive environment for learning. Indeed, CEEDs’ tech has been used at the Bergen-Belsen memorial site in Germany for two years. The team says now that discussions are ongoing with museums in the Netherlands, the UK and the US ahead of the 2015 commemorations of the end of World War II.