PART 1

SELF QUANTIFICATION A CRITICAL APPROACH

Broadening the quantified self is a project that wants to trigger a different environment for our self tracking data.
As we feel the corporate vision of quantified self is a little monolithic, we thought there might be a need for a collective exploration of the self quantification practices, in order to associate them to the multiplicity of our personal health practices.

Self Tracking props such as the ones often used in sports by joggers are now part of our daily apparatus overseeing our most intimate relation with walking, heart beat and more they are often credited for their potential to trigger behavioural changes by rewarding our efforts and daily hygiene.
They include sensors that measure different aspects of our physiology, however the sensors are controled by digital devices that are used to quantify this information, as such they tend to split the way we perceive our effort our body and its environment. Our movements become bits of information that are uploaded to a server, how does this impact our self image? Furthermore Self tracking phenomenon is a problematic economic success that enters in our daily life. A new economy is being built based on our donated data, every bit of information is transformed into a valuable material for wealthy corporations.

While most of the time comercial applications proposes to upload this information to a social network, where one can visualize in a dashboard her or his efforts and/or consumption, this project aims to overtake the quantified self functionning and integrate it in Minetest an open playful mutiuser environment, where people can use their quanified self data to transform the minetest map and collectively play with their sensor data.

PART 2

BROADENING THE QUANTIFIED SELF A playful process in Minetest to get your data online

PROJECT:A collective environment to play with your heart beat data

Minetest is a great creative environment where people can build architecture develop characters and interact with each other, in this game people can meet chat and explore the game map alone or together, there is also different features that let you build greatenvironments and make great stories.

It is a perfect space to experiment what could be a different social plateform for people to play with self tracking data.

Minetest is a voxel game engine and game, very similar to Minecraft, while being free and open source. It enables players to build an environement composed of cubes, they symbolize various materials and have different properties. The game is fully extendable, and allows for its third-party mods, that permit to program specific comportments and add new items or characteristics to the game.

A MINETEST MOD, proposition for a group environment for QUANTIFIED SELF DATA

In this prototype we offer you to measure your heartbeat and to use this information as raw material in minetest.

Please put your finger onto the woden hand holding the pulse sensor, you will see your heart beat displayed on the right screen.

These computers are also presenting a local minetest map that you can play.

This prototype will be evolving along time and  we propose to use your heartbeat in different ways, this is an ongoing process and we will be building

PROPOSITION 1:
This proposition can be implemented in a home setting Change the characteristics of the interaction by automating certain processes such as for example taking over the keyboard and set the digging speed according to the heart beat data, you can easily do this at home using a simple arduino board that will mine for you according to your instructions.
Look at the Minercise project that presents a complete environement for a personal sport installation.

PROPOSITION 2:
A collective proposition where each user can take part in the building of a collective heartbeat world
Change the camera viewpoint in order to see your self and change the scale by adapting the space of the movement in the environment.

PROPOSITION 3:  
This is directed to already experienced users, you can make your own minetest environment using logiblocs and minesecon in order to trigger perceptual changes by having it respond to your heart beat. Make an environment that responds to the input by  through a change in light, color, or some form of pulsation.
For example, make a pulsating light environement using a command block acting s a timer and light blocks as output.