Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. SIGGRAPH Asia 2013, November 19 – 22, 2013, Hong Kong. Copyright © ACM 978-1-4503-2511-0/13/11 $15.00 A-me: Augmented Memories Jordi Puig 1 , Andrew Perkis 1 , Aud Sissel Hoel 1 , Alvaro Cassinelli 2 Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) 1 Department of Information Physics and Computing, The University of Tokyo 2 Abstract A-me is a fictitious memory-evoking apparatus at the intersection of science, art and technology. The system enables users to experience other people’s memories as well as store their own by interacting with a volumetric representation (MR) of a human brain. The user retrieves or stores memories (audio traces) by pointing and clicking at precise voxels locations. Triggered by their exploratory action, a story is slowly revealed and recomposed in the form of whispering voices revealing intimate stories. A-me it’s a public receptacle for private memories, thus exploring the possibility of a collective physical brain. The installation introduces an original optical see-through AR setup for neuronavigation capable of overlaying a volume rendered MR scan onto a physical dummy head. Implementing such a system also forced us to address technical questions on quality assessment of AR systems for brain visualization. CR Categories: H.5.2 [Information Interfaces And Presentation]: User Interfaces—Graphical user interfaces (GUI); I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques—Interaction Techniques Keywords: augmented reality, visualization, collective experience, memory retrieval. 1 Introduction Questions such as: “What is the basis of human behavior, though or memory? How do we define actions and decision processes? Can memories be disembodied from the individual that experienced them? Can memories be recorded and shared?” have traditionally been addressed by philosophers and psychologists using introspection and verbal report. While neurologists are looking at the connectivity of neurons, cognitive neuroscientists are seeking answers through behavioral experimentation, neuroimaging and computational modeling. In the young field of cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, psychological functions are partially classified by the localization of their underlying circuitry in specific areas in the brain. The emergence of powerful radiological measurement techniques (e.g., fMRI, PET, SPECT) combined with experimental techniques from cognitive psychology allows neuroscientists to address questions of the human mind such as cognition, emotion or memory by looking for their neural correlates in the physiological brain. Figure 1: A-me being used by the author. Discussions on brain/mind matters and functionality take place across several specialized scientific disciplines, yet many fundamental questions remain of public interest and are at the core of everyday human experience. A-me offers the opportunity of a free, personal reflection on some aspects of these discussions; for one, the work exposes the ambiguity between the possibility of accurately locating places in the brain, and the uncertainty of defining a place in the world (or the brain) for a mnemonic experience. The installation also forces us to reflect on the ownership of a memory item: Whom do memories belong to? Are memories private events? Can we manipulate them? 2 Motivation What is memory? Where is it? Do memories remain the same forever? Are they modified depending on our current emotional state or our will? What is the substance of a memory? Since these questions are tied to the nature of human experience itself, it’s not surprising they were explored extensively in philosophy, art and literature well before these could be considered in scientific terms. The problem of localizing ‘a memory’ is ill posed because the relation between a place and a memory can be considered in multiple ways. Before the advent of computational theories of the mind, a ‘memory’ had not other physical correlate in the world than, perhaps, the place where the