Charlie Gerard

From flying drones with her thoughts to fashioning interactive clothing, creative technologist Charlie Gerard gives us an insight into her many side projects and explains how front-end devs can get started with machine learning

- Oliver Lindberg

Charlie Gerard is fascinated with human-computer interaction, in particular how you can use web technologies in unusual ways outside of the browser. She realised that if there’s an API or JavaScript framework, you don’t actually have to use devices as they were intended but instead you can hack them and build your own prototypes. For her first side project, she controlled a Sphero robotic ball with a Leap Motion and a sprinkle of Node.js in order to make it move with hand gestures. It eventually led her to wow conference audiences around the world with a talk about controlling things with the brain using JS.

“I was researching other devices I could buy and came across brain sensors,” Gerard remembers. “I became interested in neurotechnology and it really opened up a world for me. I had absolutely no idea that you could just buy a brain sensor and that as a dev I could build something with it. As soon as I discovered that, I had to tell people.”

Gerard learned that some sensors like the NeuroSky give you access to raw data, which can be used for machine learning. Others give you access to mental commands or facial expressions, making it possible to interact with a web interface through eye movements. At the time there wasn’t a JavaScript framework to use with the Emotiv Epoc sensor, so to build an interface, Gerard wrote her own opensource JavaScript framework, based on the sensor’s C++ SDK, as well as a Node.js add-on. It enabled other developers to play around with this technology without having to learn C++ or Java. The experiments she built with it include a brain keyboard (look right or left to highlight a letter, blink to select and display it in the input field), pushing a three.js 3D cube and even flying a mini drone with mental commands.