The Art of MR. Staging the Connectome.

An interactive visualization of brain data. This interactive installation uses high resolution state-of-the-art data derived from the Leipzig Max Planck Institute’s magnetic resonance imaging systems. In addition to the cortical anatomy, we visualise the shape of anatomical connections between functional areas. According to their direction, these fibres are presented in different colours: fibres running from front to back are shown in green; fibres from top to bottom are blue and fibres which interconnect the two hemispheres are red. “Staging the Connectome.” allows viewers to explore the brain and its connections while navigating the data with their own movement. An Xbox Kinect tracks the position of the users’ heads inside the room. For one viewer, one or multiple perpendicular slices are projected with a very direct coupling of user movement and slice transition—it feels like walking through your own brain. For two viewers, two so-called regions of interest are coupled with the viewers’ head positions, and the fibre connections between these two are displayed. In this visualisation format you can explore neuroscientific data in a beautiful and intuitive way—the proportions of the brain are respected and directly translate into the virtual brain space of approximately 3.5 by 2.5 by 2.5 meters. You can watch a video of the interactive installation here (4 min with short explanations): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtsBZlw5nQI or here (3 min "best of" without explanations): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hMNZHsrNHw Details about the first implementation of the interactive installation can be found on https://zenodo.org/record/3596593 For more information please see the `_details.pdf` file