Another Commercial BCI System

[Shawn Taylor]

Here is another BCI system that I just ran across:
http://www.overclock3d.net/news.php?/input_devices/ocz_prepares_neural_impulse_actuator_for_shipping_next_week/1

-shawn

[GilZ]

It looks interesting since it claims that it combines several sources
of biopotentials to do the job. It mentions that it was used to play
the Unreal Tournament. I wonder if it was enough to provide full
gaming experience. In any case, I think that soon the technologies
involved will be developed to a point of being as affordabe and user
friendly as mechanical interfaces are today.

Do you know of any study that looks at how the brain gets used to
these devices? In the case of mechanical interfaces I think repeated
use of the devices leads to automatic responses, i.e. it seems that we
don't think about the mechanics of our response, and I wonder if the
same happens with these CBIs.

Gilberto.

On Mar 2, 1:56 pm, Shawn Taylor <send.to.sh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Here is another BCI system that I just ran across:http://www.overclock3d.net/news.php?/input_devices/ocz_prepares_neura...
>
> -shawn

[Shawn Taylor]

From what I've read, I don't think this system yet provides a full
gaming experience. I believe that in the demo OCZ had set up at
CeBIT, you still moved your view with a mouse and used the BCI to
control character movement and shooting. Based on this sentence from
the linked article, "The biopotentials are broken into frequency
specific components that allow a reasonably fine granularity of
control for the novice user" I think the interface method is still
rather crude (which is perfectly reasonable for the first such device
in this market). It sounds like you provide control by learning to
manipulate the magnitude of activity in different frequency bands
(i.e. brainwaves). This is a long way off from anything like picking
up a signal in premotor cortex that corresponds to moving left. As
you can read in the below link, it seems that in novice users, the NIA
isn't acting as a direct brain interface, but rather operating off
facial muscle biopotentials. Apparently, as the user learns better
brain control, the device can start to act as more of a true BCI. For
those interested, we should start seeing more reviews of the OCZ NIA
as CeBIT is a huge convention and OCZ has a demo set up there. Here's
a link to one such review: http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=3252&p=2
-shawn