Brain control is not in the distant future, it’s alive and finding useful applications for itself in both academics and the gaming community. Gaming will most likely be the first commercialized success of a brain-computer interface (BCI) much like Kinect with it’s motion-controlled sensors from Primesense, jump started other uses of motion control outside of the gaming industry.
At Futur-en-Seine last week in Paris, OpenVibe2, supported by INRIA, a French research intitute (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique) and nine commercial partners (including Ubisoft, Kylotonn and Black Sheep) showed off its open source software platform that enables researchers or game developers to design and test Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). A BCI is a communication systems enabling users to send commands to computers by means of brain activity via a headset fitted with electrodes.
But it’s not the commercial gaming applications that are most interesting here, it’s the application of BCI to children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Using a head set, either an academic one in the photo above or from Emotiv, which started to produce a $299 neuro-headset last year, you can harness the areas of the brain related to attention.
In the application of BCI to children with ADHD, OpenVibe and CLARTE created a game that focuses on the part of the brain that’s related to non attention. The game is based in a classroom where there are a number of activities going on that can be controlled by the student if he focuses on that area.
In the game, there’s an out of focus cartoon playing. In order to view the cartoon, the student has to focus on the screen to control the viewing of the cartoon. The principle being if they don’t focus the cartoon, it stays blurry. The teacher in the game can also ask them to retrieve things from around the classroom, so again when they focus, the objects in the game move from one place to the other. All of the activity the student can control lets them score points in the game.
The OpenVibe2 project, with all its commercial and academic partners, brings together neuroscience, computer science, signal processing, ergonomics and video games all under one roof.
This video shows how the BCI game is intended to work.