Status update: Phase 1 is built and the sketch heatmap has now shipped. Still a limited beta with approved testers.
The question
When a viewer produces something during a session — a stroke on the sketchpad, a written impression — what is happening in the brain in the seconds just before that output? Remote-viewing lore has long described a receptive, quiet, cool-down state (people point to theta and alpha rhythms). We would rather measure than assume. So we are building an instrument to look.
What we are building
If you wear a supported EEG headband during a blind session, rv.studio records your brainwaves in the background and lines them up, on one shared clock, with the exact moments you drew or wrote. Nothing about this changes the viewing itself — during the session you see only a small monitoring label with a per-sensor fit indicator, deliberately, so the instrument never nudges you toward a state.
Two headbands are supported today:
- Muse (Muse S / 2) — 4 sensors (TP9, AF7, AF8, TP10).
- FocusBand / Neuphoria — 3 forehead sensors (2 EEG channels + a reference). We reverse-engineered its Bluetooth protocol from scratch so it works the same way in the browser.
Both connect over Web Bluetooth on a desktop Chrome or Edge browser. A page can never scan or connect silently — your browser always asks you to pick the band and confirm.
After you reveal, it becomes a session brain map:
- A timeline — your band powers (delta / theta / alpha / beta / gamma) across the session, with a marker on every stroke onset, note-typing burst, and stage change.
- A sketch heatmap (now live) — the brain state painted onto the drawing itself: each stroke tinted by the brainwave power at the instant it was drawn, and you can switch which band colours it. Which part of a gestalt came during a theta peak?
- AI-scored hits, flagged on both (now live) — if you run the AI analyst, the stages where it found a hit are flagged in gold on the timeline and the heatmap, so you can eyeball whether your correct impressions line up with particular brain states.
- The moments before an output (Phase 2, next) — for each stroke and each written impression, we look at the EEG in the window just before it and compare it to your session baseline. Is there a repeatable pre-output signature?
What we are testing, and what we are NOT claiming
This is exploratory instrumentation, not proof of anything. We are giving you a way to see your own signal aligned to your own outputs. Early on, samples are small, and blinks and jaw-clenches show up as artifacts — so we store electrode-contact quality alongside the signal and flag noisy stretches. Forehead bands in particular are noisier than a full headband, and frontal sensors see some rhythms (like alpha) only weakly. We report what we find plainly, with counts, and without dressing correlation up as mechanism. If there turns out to be no pre-output signature, that is a real and useful result too.
Your data stays yours
- Blind-safe: EEG is your physiology — it is never joined to a target, never appears in a reveal payload, and is never fed to the AI analyst, scoring, or any leaderboard.
- Owner-only by default: only you can see your brain maps. You may now opt in to include your brain map on a session you publicly share — off by default, your choice each time, and never available for a private (encrypted) session.
- Private (end-to-end encrypted) sessions: the brain map is encrypted in your browser; the server stores only ciphertext, and it is analysed only on your own device.
- Portable and deletable: brain maps are listed in your data export and delete to free their storage.
Where it stands
- Phase 1 — built: the headband connection (Muse and FocusBand / Neuphoria), the session recorder (EEG + your timestamped strokes/notes on one clock), owner-only encrypted storage, the post-reveal timeline, the sketch heatmap, and AI-hit flagging. It is in limited beta with approved testers; everyone else sees a coming-soon marker in the session tools.
- Phase 2 — next: the moments-before-output analysis (a per-viewer pre-output signature).
- Phase 3 — later: a phone/computer bridge so an iPad viewer can use a headband too, optional live biofeedback, and looking across many sessions.
Want to be a tester?
You will need a Muse or a FocusBand / Neuphoria headband and a desktop Chrome or Edge browser (that is the Web-Bluetooth path; iPad support comes with the Phase-3 bridge). Request access right from your dashboard (look for the Brain Map beta card) or in Settings → Beta programs. Once an admin approves you and you accept the data-sharing agreement, the headband unlocks and you can start mapping your sessions. Questions? Reply here.
Acknowledgments, and a note on the hardware
Connecting these headbands in the browser builds on protocol work the open-source community shared generously. For the Muse we are grateful to muse-js, muse-rs, and OpenMuse, and to Alexandre Barachant’s original reverse-engineering write-up; the newer Muse S (Athena) protocol and the FocusBand we decoded ourselves. Thank you to everyone who documented these devices in the open.
rv.studio is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Muse (InteraXon), FocusBand, or Neuphoria. All product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners, and headband support is provided on a best-effort basis.
Method-agnostic, opt-in, and honest, like everything here — we are just adding a new lens.
— RV.studio Staff