Mix tape of happiness (Oct 2015)

Late 2009 I was trying to figure out Nokia’s gaming strategy while playing the first version of Angry Birds on my unannounced Nokia N900 smartphone. I thought it was a great game, but I had no idea that I was playing a game that would become the most popular video game of all times. Today over a billion people have played Angry Birds games, and a full length Hollywood film is in production.

At the same time I was helping Nokia Research Center to figure out new use-cases for their prototype Augmented Reality (AR) glasses. This pre-Google Glass project was run by a superb team in Nokia’s Hollywood Research Lab. One of the team members used his Oscar Statue as paper weight at the office. I thought that was the coolest thing!

The team had came up with lot of different use-cases from see through walls and infinite memory to gesture based web searches. I wanted to come up with something more personal. Something that could change the way how people would react with this new strange form function. Finally when I saw a prototype of the first portable brain wave tracker, the perfect idea hit me!

“Mix Tape of Happiness is a concept that marries brain wave tracking to glasses’ capability to constantly record video from first person perspective. Each time your brain tracks “happy” waves the glass will store the moment on a video clip. These clips are collected to cloud storage and turned into memories that you can live over and over again.”

2009 was too early for the AR glass concept. We couldn’t get the batteries or cameras to fit the frame. Pupil tracking, see through display technology and brain wave tracking devices were not ready for mass production. I completely forgot the Mix Tape of Happiness concept until I received Google Glass and the new Emotiv Headset. Now it is actually possible to build the concept.