Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.