Here at Sturm Interactive, we’re tired of using our meat hands to accomplish tasks.
Don’t get me wrong, we do like all of our digits, but I’m kinda tired of lifting my hand up and off whatever to do something else. Especially when I’ll just return my hand to that last position it was at before to continue (typing code). It’s a vicious cycle.
There are a few things I can initially think of that would be nice to not have to do with my hands while typing:
- Adjust or mute music volume
- Switch between virtual desktops
- Switch to an application
- Etc. Etc. Etc.
So I thought, what the best place to start? Brain wave recognition!
Btw, this is a pretty big subject. People go to school for a really long time to learn about the inner workings of any brain. And those wonderful scientists are probably just scratching the surface. I wonder sometimes if the old saying that humans only use ~10% of the brain’s potential is true? I’m not sure what that actually means. But, I haven’t heard that in a while, so hopefully this was the comprehension percentage of what was actually going on inside the noodle.
Possibly, a lot of the advancements in the understanding of the human brain has been recently due to Functional MRI technology. They’re kinda like a CAT scan only in motion. FMRI’s are cool when observing how the brain works in various situations, scarry when advertising agencies use them to see what kind of response/effect their commercials do to people.
So, about a year ago I decided to figure out some hands free computing myself. First step, find the most efficient way into brain wave detection as possible. Then figure out next step to achieving my goal.
Hello Mindflex.
Yep, a fun toy brought to you by Mattel. You concentrate or relax your mind to adjust (with your mind) a fan that hovers a ball up and down, and you turn a knob to send it through a maze.
Check it out: http://mindflexgames.com.
The reason for the Mindflex was that I quickly found an excellent way to “get into it” online. I love the internet.
Have a look at Frontier Nerds’s article and video on How to Hack Toy EEGs. They totally got me started in this adventure. So, they taught me to tap into the Mindflex which was surprisingly quick. All I had to do was solder a few leads into a Nerosky daughter card.
Totally cool, and that article also had the code to hook up to Processing and display the data.
This was a lot of fun. But the problem was, the device had a baud rate of 9600(slow) and it was fixed. It would update the brainwaves every shy second. Not really good for pattern matching algorithms. Yes, algorithms are you’re friend.
So… I needed a new device that would capture at a higher resolution and possibly have an SDK that I could utilize.
Hello emotiv EPOC.
This headset one lean mean brain recognition machine. Totally awesome… Check out more info here at Emotiv.
This baby has 14 channels, 2 gyro’s and one heck of an SDK. Works great on our game dev station. They even have training software to essentially make a box move where you want on the screen. Excellent for parties.
Probably the best example of what this headset can do. Check out this video of a car being driven using the emotive EPOC headset
Plus, they’re going to (eventually) come out with an Objective C SDK soon!
That video is awesome. The software that they’re using comes with the Research Headset package. Obviously that car has some gear on it to work with the headset. It’s not quite a video game controller quite yet. Soon it will be.
More to come on this! Probably with some open source software so you can work on saving your wrists. ;-)
