Quick Initial Thoughts/Comments on the Procyon

[Tyler]

Hello,

I just purchased a Procyon from Tools for Wellness. The Procyon represents the first "mind machine" that I've purchased. I have to say that I'm impressed and am enjoying the vividness of the images and color. The claims about vibrant 3D images, patterns and colors is accurate. I can understand clearly and am experiencing more powerful entrainment effects with the visual stimulus...and it makes meditating more fun and entertaining. All in all, I'm very glad I purchased the unit, look forward to the other biofeedback and EEG products that are upcoming, and I look forward to be a member of the community here.

My one piece of constructive feedback has to do with the ability to enjoy Syncromuse sessions. I am a fairly technical person who has done multimedia and web projects and is comfortable configuring my home network--for example--to stream media files to my TV from my computer.

I feel, though, that the effort to create a syncromuse session is fairly involved, and, to be honest, even though I think I would greatly enjoy the result, I'm not sure if I'll have the time to undertake the various involved steps to create a Syncromuse session. Of course, when there are CD's etc available I can purchase those, but unless I'm mistaken I don't believe there are many on the market at the moment.

Having read the Syncromuse tutorial, I think the barrier for me personally is the interface in the tools application. It is very numbers driven and what I'd call analytical. For someone who is a former English major and is visually oriented (hence the purchase of the most sophisticated mind machine on the market!), an analytical/numbers driven interface is a barrier to me exploring further.

My suggestion would be to encourage an interface that allows for experimentation, play and a "visual" approach to programming sessions. Some ideas:

1) What if you could "paint" your Syncromuse session? Using the available color palette for the Procyon, one could paint the color mix they wanted to see, and the software would interpret that back to the appropriate color values, brightness, amplitude, etc. Then, for each segment, rather than having a range of numerical inputs and technical labels, the user would "start with painting A" and "end with painting b."

2) Or, in the same vein as a paint program approach, you could have various color schemes pre-rendered, then the user would manipulate an interface that drives the appropriate variables. For example, the user might have a gallery of calm colors in the blue and green range. They would choose a color portrait, and it would be loaded into an interface like one would see in an adobe photoshop plug in that would allow them to manipulate the attributes.


I offer the above suggestions humbly, not being a computer programmer or understanding what it would take to impliment such ideas. I do know, though, that having a visual interface that focused on the "color picture" rather than on the numbers and variables, would make it much more likely for me as a user to take advantage of what appears to be a powerful and wonderful feature.

Thank you again for creating a wonderful piece of technology. I am pleased that my research ended up being correct--the Procyon is the best machine, feature for feature, available today.

Tyler

[Andy]

Hi Tyler and welcome!

I'm glad you're enjoying your new purchase and thank you for your kind words!

Thanks for the suggestions about the software. Our hopes are since the synchromuse system is royalty-free, that perhaps some kind programmers out there will take the ball and run with it to produce some simplified editors. At the moment, our programmers are running full-out working on the new products. Perhaps sometime in the future we'll have a bit of spare time to build a proper synchromuse editor. As far as making our own discs, that's something we'd like to do as well, but finding appropriate (inexpensive) music and building the discs is a fairly elaborate procedure. I guess that's why the AudioStrobe discs are so expensive!
I guess for now, there's always audiostrobe if you would like to purchase some pre-made discs.