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Brain Controlled Tightrope Video Game Shown

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the tank-i-need-a-program dept.

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. "

8 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Concentrating on images inside the brain by kjba · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Although this seems to be a promising field, I don't see yet how it can help people that are completely paralysed. The user has to concentrate on certain external images. This means that the user must still be able to move his eyes. For those people that can still move their eyes, better alternatives involving very precise eye-movement sensors exist.

    I would be much more impressed if they could tell from my brainwaves wether I am thinking of a car or a dog.

    1. Re:Concentrating on images inside the brain by deman1985 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Very true. In its current phase, it is not directly applicable for pari/quadriplegics, but again, it is still only in very early stages of development. With hope, it will eventually progress far enough such that people will be able to walk again just as if they'd never become paralyzed or lost their legs. If they're able to monitor for the proper brainwaves, they should be able to pick up on the impulses that would normally trigger muscle contractions in the legs. The main problem when monitoring for these types of brainwaves, however, is that a person doesn't actually "concentrate" on individual muscle groups; it's mostly involuntary. As a result, it must be more difficult for them to pick these impulses out.

      There are many applications for this type of technology even beyond restoring body movement, though. It might become a totally new way of accepting user input for desktop machines. Think of the application you want to run, and it runs it, or write documents by merely thinking words. For gaming, it could mean having the ultimate life-like simulation for first person shooters. Such technology would probably require people to concentrate better on the tasks at hand, however-- no wondering thoughts...

      --
      KappaStone :: Constant Innovation
    2. Re:Concentrating on images inside the brain by imkonen · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I would assume that's the long-term goal...it's not there yet, but eventually they would not want to be limited to helping just those people who can still move their eyes. New technologies typically start out unable to beat (in terms of speed, reliability or ease of use) the older more entrenched technologies they will eventually replace.

      The interesting thing to me was that the boxes are flashing at different frequencies. I suspect their machine is not picking up anything that could be positively identified as "thinking about a particular box" but simply picking up a frequency (or a harmonic) in the brain-wave that matches the frequency of the box you're looking at. It might not even be reacting to conscious thoughts per-se but neural signals in the visual pathway. Does this machine work if you close your eyes and try to picture one the flashing boxes in your head? You might have to train yourself to think of a box flashing at a particular frequency, but if you could, it's a start. No answer on the news site of course.

      Even if it never gets to the point where it can tell you're thinking of a dog or a car, it could be useful. Even if paraplegics have to train themselves to think at a few different frequencies to communicate by "20 questions" (since this is /., think Capt. Pike here), if that's all they've got, it beats the hell out of having nothing at all.

  2. Applications? by Killjoy_NL · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)
  3. We had those in the 1970s... by Punk+Walrus · · Score: 4, Interesting
    When I was growing up, there were a lot of "ESP Kits" that had crude monitors that supposedly measured brain waves for a new-age fad called "Biofeedback." Mostly they were for helping you get into a medictate trance, but one of them claimed to run a race car slot track based on Alpha Waves (state of relaxed brain activity in mediation), so the the excitiment of winning made you go slower, and not giving a crap whether you won or not made you win. Seemed like a pretty odd balance. That might have been good to learn "the ultimate poker face."

    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.

  4. Hell, I did this 20 years ago... by TheVidiot · · Score: 4, Interesting


    I simply interfaced to my VCS.

  5. Re:typing reply with my brain... by elhaf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  6. Re:"The Game" by Ayaress · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.