Your brain can control the movie you are watching

A director has created a movie that you can control with your mind. 

If you’re a viewer of Richard Ramchurn’s films, you might put on a EEG headset, and find a different version of the film each time you watch it, depending on the electrical activity firing in your brain.

Ramchurn is a graduate student at the University of Nottingham in England, and fascinated by this form of interactive film. His latest work is a 27-minute film called The Moment, which fittingly explores a dark future of brain-computer interfaces. At small, private screenings inside a trailer, six to eight people can view the film, while one of them controls the plot.

The audience in charge wears a NeuroSky MindWave, which tracks brain activity that is supposed  to correspond with attentiveness. The data gets sent to Ramburn’s custom-built software, which then makes adjustments to the film: editing scenes, changing background music, and more. “The film changes because of how you feel, and the way you feel changes because of the film,” MIT Technology Review describes.

The film switches back and forth between two of its three narrative threads. Ramchurn believes there are about 101 trillion different versions of the film. To set up the 27-minute-experimental film, he had to capture three times as much footage and six times as much audio as a normal film.

Because the film is controlled by a single viewer, it’s unlikely to become a widespread theatrical release. For larger audiences, Ramchurn has other ideas: maybe multiple members could complete to be the main controller, or maybe measuring average reactions could determine what exists on the screen. In the end, he imagines a cooperative mode in which every viewer gets to affect some element of the film will work best.

Ramchurn is not the first person to try to get audiences to interact with movies—the history of cinema is filled with efforts.

Jacob Gaboury, an assistant professor of film and media at the University of California, Berkeley, remembers sitting in a theater in the 1990s and using a joystick to choose between two different film endings. Making films that respond to brain activity might lead filmmakers to create different kinds of stories, images, and sounds than they normally would, he says.

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