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Brain Controlled Tightrope Video Game Shown
Bob Sherpowski writes "According to CBBC News, they have come up with a 'game' that you control directly with your brain waves. University College Dublin researchers have designed a game where you are trying to get a monster to walk across a tightrope - if he leans one way or the other you have to concentrate on a box on either side of the tightrope to make him tip the other way. It's still in research and it's not for sale yet but it's the first step. "
Of course, playing the game seems to leave a lot of people looking and acting like this: guy, so most people are hesitant to try it out.
I would be much more impressed if they could tell from my brainwaves wether I am thinking of a car or a dog.
I think this is great research, it could give paraplegics (sp?) etc the possibility to walk again with mechanical limbs.
Or am I wrong ??
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Virtual Valerie will never be the same.
Having never owned one of those biofeedback devices, I can't say if they ever worked, but I saw lots of ads for them in the mid-late 1970s in magazines like Omni and Popular Mechanics.
I simply interfaced to my VCS.
I recently went to a thesis defense studying some brainwave computer interface. There seems to be a lot of interesting study going on here. This particular thesis was studying a particular type of interface that focuses on what one of the commitee members called the "ah ha!" reaction. The implemented system used a scull cap with probes like an EEG on it that targeted a particular set of waves. The user would watch a screen interface and icons representing choices would flash randomly. Whenever the icon the user wanted flashed, they were instructed to count that as a flash in their head. After enough samples were taken, that selection was made. The experiment they did involved a user having a rebotic arm make a cup of coffee. This study measured the change in brainwave at a particular period of time. Also mentioned were other studies where immediate measurement of a 'focused'/'relaxed' change in another set of brainwaves to control a cursor on the screen. Both types were also non-invasive using EEG type technolgoy. Also mentioned were current experiments in invasive brain/computer interaction where direct measurement of neurons in monkeys allowed them to control a robotic arm of some sort.
This really isn't all that new. IBVA has been working with this for a while, and also does many other things. There are kits to use brainwave patterns to fastforward or rewind your VCR/DVD Player/CD Player, create midi compositions from your brainwaves while you sleep, and a game control system for consoles. You can also record brainwave patterns while you jog or do whatever else and aren't within range of the receiver.
Oh, and they also claim to have some Linux stuff in the pipe as well. Though, admittedly, I don't know how long it's been "coming soon"
I couldn't agree more. This is a revolutionary step while at the same time, it is a pretty lame game. If games of this type advance the same way we have gone from a square dot bouncing back and forth the result in about 10 years or so will blow us away. this signature is protected under GPL
LooseChanj's Law: Just because something is possible, doesn't mean it can happen.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but by its very definition, possibility means "can happen". The likelihood, however, is a different issue.
..theoretically before the experience of playing a game or even watching a movie is completely "neural" without extermal stimuli. If you've taken any psychology class you might have studied the research involving converting analogue sound to digital sound then to chemical neural impulses for the brain. The same thing goes for vision. Originally the patient had to carry around a cart that had housed the eleoctronic device that did this. Now it's a small belt sort of device, essentially smaller and more accurate. Imagine sometime in the future (and who knows when) that we have perfected the conversion of sound we hear to action potentials in the brain. We could even have devices that pick up signals unrecognizable by the human ear (radio waves) and convert them into action potentials. Think of this for somatosensory mechanisms in the brain, vision, smell, everything. If you've read the science fiction series Otherland you may understand what I am talking about. I also think it opens a lot of doors in discovering what really creates the "conscious" experience of sense. That is, how action potentials in our brain create the reality of the outside world that see, feel, hear, etc.
Brainmaster has been doing this for years. I just sold mine on e-bay. The games are all silly, because there is no way to have a Doom-like experience with a single bit of input, which is currently what these amount to (I'm on the target wavelength or I'm not). While on target, the game advances, otherwise it doesn't. Kind of like the original rebel assault, but without a fire button. Whee.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
Right before everything fell apart at Atari (in 1984) there was this headband controller. The designer thought he was a genius. Atari was losing millions of bucks a day, but he was wandering the halls with this thing strapped to his head, certain that he was going to make millions on royalties.
You wrapped the band around your noggin and a couple of electrodes picked up changes in resistance caused by tensing your muscles. So you could furrow your brow (and move a paddle to the left...) or unfurrow (and move the paddle to the right...) and thus play pong, hands-free. (After five or ten minutes, users generally had a headache). Of course, the sweat of exertion changed the skin resistance as you played, and you had to recalibrate the thing every couple of minutes.
You can clean joysticks. But a sweaty headband, just used by someone else? Ick!
Seriously: A controller with fewer than "a few nines" of reliability isn't much of a controller, unless you're handicapped or something and can do nothing else.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
That's what they thought, and why it was so easy for people to try the game. But the game was more than just an audiovisual game, it directly effected their brains, releasing a powerful surge of pleasure (complete with suddenly relaxing muscles, dialating pupils, and a heavy sigh - sort of an electronic orgasm, the way the actors portrayed it) when you got the disk things into the wierd conical wormlike things.
If you've read Richter 10, or The Terminal Man, or even read about the experiments with hooking the pleasure centers of a rat's brain up to a button, you'd know the addictive power that that can have.
A rat hooked up to the aforementioned device will eventuall stop eating, drinking, and will ignore receptive female rats to push the button repeatedly, because the electrical jolt to the brain's pleasure centers produces a far stronger pleasure than any normal stimulus ever can.
In The Terminal Man, the guy's brain eventually learned to manufacture false seizures to trigger the same sort of electrical impulses from his implant.
In Richter 10, many people became endophin addicts when their bodies learned to produce headaches on demand to trigger endorphin rushes from their anti-migraine implants.
The Game was the same sort of thing, while holodecks were just glorified video games - they certainly produced pleasure, and anything that produces pleasure can prove addictive, and the people in Star Trek clearly have to have a level of self control to prevent that; but The Game operated directly on the brain, and could produce far greater feelings of pleasure than is possible normally, and thus far harder to resist.
If you have ADD or ADHD or just can't pay attention long enough, video games that feedback your brain waves have a value.
http://www.canoe.ca/Health9912/22_adhd.html
Wavepoint, here in Edmonton, AB Canada has gone beyond research and clinically uses the technology to help people with ADD, (Attention Deficit Disorder).
I was going to try it, but when I saw the $8000 price to play their video game, my ADD kicked in and I lost interest.
through these interesting appendages called 'hands' and 'feet'. These are actually directly wired to centers in my brain, and they can be used directly to control games, etc.
Seriously folks, with all due respect, why are we spending lots of money to develop what amounts to an inherently low bandwidth control? Trying to control something by modifying brain waves, to make it go 'left' or 'right', will never compete with a directly wired hand, the nerves of which will always have a much higher bandwidth and will always provide faster response with a greater range of control.
This is like trying to fall back on a 300 baud modem in the age of fiber!