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Playing Games With One's Brainwaves
PolloDiablo writes "Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have reported success with recording the signals a brain sends out to the other parts of the body and using them to play a game. The subjects had to move a cursor towards a target in a one-dimensional environment without using any bodypart, just pure brainpower. One subject had a success rate of 100%. This could prove a breakthrough in the use of prosthetics. The next step is repeating the same test in a 2-dimensional environment. Similar tests have been done with monkeys before but never with humans."
Make sure your developers aren't Russian, else you'll need to think in Russian to fire your weapons, and that'd suck.
How do you say 'railgun' in Russian, anyway?
I seem to remember seeing pictures demonstrating one-dimensional cursor movement using the human mind years ago. I'm confident that I'm not imagining things.
Maybe emotions could be used to help provide movement as well. An intense emotion such as anger has been known to motivate people.
activity-data taken invasively right from the brain surface
I don't think that extra millisecond of response time in your favorite videogame is worth invasive brain surgery.
My point is, this sounds incredible, however the topic is slightly misleading; this is not yet ready as a practical application because it does require brain surgery, and I for one am not in the mood to have an assortment of wires placed on the surface of my brain.
it's much easier to do invasively than non-invasively, as they state. in this article they sort of market invasive as being superior, but that depends on your perspective. it is superior in its ease of understanding signals, but it is inferior to those who object to direct tinkering with the brain.
ideally we could accurately decipher signals non-invasively to get the same result. invasive is inherently more dangerous, and certainly more complicated from a medical point of view.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
What I saw was one dimensional, and I think I saw it on the Discovery Channel back in the day, as in 2001 or before.
Of course, none of this will do us any good until developers finally adopt the 1DGSC recommendations (One Dimensional Gaming Standards Committee).
As it is now, all those 1-D games that we all know and love each operate on an entire different API! In one game it's all Up and Down. In another it's North/South... or +/-. Madness, I say!
I remember picking up something back a while ago, from a company called "The Other 90% Technologies" that used an electrode you attach to a finger to control the games. It was basically a downhill slalom skiing game. You had to "think hard right" and "relax left" in order to move the playing piece. I couldn't quite get the hang of it, and ended up giving the thing away. Cost was around $30 or so.
>so I can play Far Cry, Half Life 2, etc. without worrying about pain.
I'm thinking that by the time you can control the game with brain waves, the game will send your brain pain signals when you get shot. No need to check a visual for your damage count, you'll feel it.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
If you read the article, you'll note that the researchers aren't using EEG, which is part of the reference you include in your seperate post.
The difference between an EEG and the technique they use in this study is invasiveness - EEGs are Non-Invasive, that is, they don't need to stick anything into your head (they attach electrodes at various points on the skull corresponding to lobes of the brain) - this study uses the ECoG, a more invasive technique for monitoring brain activity.
Note that the "breakthrough" was in acquisition of the task. This increased acquisition level may lead to much faster experimentation. Of course, the acquisition comes at a cost - invasive surgery.
Just thought I'd keep you up to article, there. =)
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
I've actually played a rudimentery version of this. It was a skiing game where you thought "center" to center yourself and left or right to move left and right. I also once played a Pacman game where the more of a certain type of brain wave you had the faster Pacman went. I became quite good at this.
I saw something like this in the 80s at the local Amiga store (Yes we had a local Amiga store!). They had a game that came with a head strap. The game consisted of bubbles that floated from the bottom of the screen to the top the more relaxed you became the bubbles would sink the more tense the bubbles would rise and pop. I saw some one play for about 15 minutes he thought he had it down to a science.... when he left the guys running the store said "hey this head set thing needs bateries that guys been watching a demo" I guess this is why it never realy took off.
You'd take potentially life-threatening brain surgery over RSI or just not playing games?