Success case:
Refik Inner Potrait
"The Inner Portrait project captures and translates first-time travellers’ brain and body signals into living data-driven art."
​Refik Anadol Studio, Turkish Airlines aimed to quantify with our help the emotional impact of long-haul journeys on people who had never left their remote homelands. Four volunteers travelled: Amazon Rain Forest → Tokyo, Iceland → Petra, Kenya → Göbeklitepe, Australia → Istanbul . Our mission was to acquire laboratory-grade EEG and biometric data both “at home” and immediately after arrival, extract robust emotional features, and feed them into Refik Anadol’s generative pipeline.
Starlab’s role: full-stack EEG & biometrics partner
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Protocol design and team training: developed dual-site Eyes-Open protocol and coached local teams.
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Sensor integration: deployed 20-channel dry-electrode Enobio plus Empatica E4 for BVP, HRV and EDA, ensuring time-locked recordings in jungle, desert, savannah and outback conditions
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Quality assurance: ran signal checks; every session met our artefact thresholds despite extreme environments
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Feature extraction: computed EmoWave™ valence, arousal, relaxation, excitement, motivation and attention, plus PSD head-maps and full HRV/EDA features.
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Statistical analytics: delivered grand-average and per-subject reports highlighting key emotional shifts and frequency-band changes.
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Creative hand-off: packaged clean time-series, feature matrices and high-resolution plots ready for direct ingestion by Refik Anadol’s studio
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Public outreach at Cannes Science Festival: hosted live Enobio demonstrations at the Turkish Airlines booth, recording visitors’ EEG, generating instant emotion reports and supporting Refik Anadol’s keynote on data-driven art
“Business-class comfort, instant emotion insight—Cannes guests got their brain report on the spot.”
Conclusions
The study confirmed that international travel evokes measurable emotional uplift even in first-time flyers from remote settings. Valence rose significantly in three of the four participants and in the grand average, accompanied by increases in excitement, motivation and attention, while relaxation generally fell in the stimulating urban destinations . Individual activation patterns varied, underscoring the personal nature of travel, but the overarching trend was a clear positive emotional shift. By delivering reliable high-fidelity EEG outside the lab, Starlab once again demonstrated why global partners trust our deep expertise to turn complex neuro-physiology into impactful insights and unforgettable experiences. Beyond the scientific insights, staging live demos at the Cannes Science Festival showcased Starlab’s ability to translate complex neuro-physiology into engaging public experiences.