Brain Controlled Tightrope Video Game Shown

Bob Sherpowski writes "According to CBBC News, they have come up with a 'game' that you control directly with your brain waves. University College Dublin researchers have designed a game where you are trying to get a monster to walk across a tightrope - if he leans one way or the other you have to concentrate on a box on either side of the tightrope to make him tip the other way. It's still in research and it's not for sale yet but it's the first step. "

The beginning of the end?

I just can't wait for the first virus to be unleashed on something like this. Instead of the device sending OUT information, it would start sending information IN.

In all seriousness, I'm overwhelmed with Doubleclick ads now, I don't need them being inputted directly.

God help us if Microsoft gets ahold of this. Instead of, "Where do you want to go tomorrow", it's "What do we want you to think about today". ;-)

Btw, what happens if you're using that device and you happen to catch a glimpse of Janet Jackson's Half Time show? Is it suddenly blown straight off your forehead? LOL!

Re: Predicted in 1917

this was predicted in 1917:

Man will, in time, manage to implant the death-forces in man,
related to electrical and magnetic forces, with external machines.
He will then be able to direct his intentions, his thoughts into the machine.

(Rudolf Steiner, Individuelle Geistwesen und einheitlicher
Weltengrund, November 25, 1917, Dornach Switzerland)

This is what the government wants!!!!

this will train out brain waves to all be the same so they can control us with better accuracy and reliability!!!!

DON'T BUY IT!!!!!!

Whoo!

The Matrix, v0.1.

Re:The new pong

pong was lame?

Bah!

I don't have a brain you insensitive clod!

Remember

You must think *in russian*

Re:Remember

You must think *in russian*

why, does the game play me?

Re:Remember

No, probably he said that because of this book:

Firefox [amazon.com]

and, of course, the movie starring Clint Eastwood:

Firefox DVD [amazon.com]

which are about a Russian warplane codenamed Firefox that has a thought-controlled weapons system.

It's a start but...

...just wait for the first Force Feedback models

Re:"The Game"

That's what they thought, and why it was so easy for people to try the game. But the game was more than just an audiovisual game, it directly effected their brains, releasing a powerful surge of pleasure (complete with suddenly relaxing muscles, dialating pupils, and a heavy sigh - sort of an electronic orgasm, the way the actors portrayed it) when you got the disk things into the wierd conical wormlike things.

If you've read Richter 10, or The Terminal Man, or even read about the experiments with hooking the pleasure centers of a rat's brain up to a button, you'd know the addictive power that that can have.

A rat hooked up to the aforementioned device will eventuall stop eating, drinking, and will ignore receptive female rats to push the button repeatedly, because the electrical jolt to the brain's pleasure centers produces a far stronger pleasure than any normal stimulus ever can.

In The Terminal Man, the guy's brain eventually learned to manufacture false seizures to trigger the same sort of electrical impulses from his implant.

In Richter 10, many people became endophin addicts when their bodies learned to produce headaches on demand to trigger endorphin rushes from their anti-migraine implants.

The Game was the same sort of thing, while holodecks were just glorified video games - they certainly produced pleasure, and anything that produces pleasure can prove addictive, and the people in Star Trek clearly have to have a level of self control to prevent that; but The Game operated directly on the brain, and could produce far greater feelings of pleasure than is possible normally, and thus far harder to resist.

Concentrating on images inside the brain

Although this seems to be a promising field, I don't see yet how it can help people that are completely paralysed. The user has to concentrate on certain external images. This means that the user must still be able to move his eyes. For those people that can still move their eyes, better alternatives involving very precise eye-movement sensors exist.

I would be much more impressed if they could tell from my brainwaves wether I am thinking of a car or a dog.

Re:Concentrating on images inside the brain

Very true. In its current phase, it is not directly applicable for pari/quadriplegics, but again, it is still only in very early stages of development. With hope, it will eventually progress far enough such that people will be able to walk again just as if they'd never become paralyzed or lost their legs. If they're able to monitor for the proper brainwaves, they should be able to pick up on the impulses that would normally trigger muscle contractions in the legs. The main problem when monitoring for these types of brainwaves, however, is that a person doesn't actually "concentrate" on individual muscle groups; it's mostly involuntary. As a result, it must be more difficult for them to pick these impulses out.

There are many applications for this type of technology even beyond restoring body movement, though. It might become a totally new way of accepting user input for desktop machines. Think of the application you want to run, and it runs it, or write documents by merely thinking words. For gaming, it could mean having the ultimate life-like simulation for first person shooters. Such technology would probably require people to concentrate better on the tasks at hand, however-- no wondering thoughts...

Not to ruin your idea

but people who are paralyzed usually are from the head down. It is damage to the spine and last time I check your eyes are not attached to your spine.

These people can in fact move their eyes. That is how current systems work, by tracking the movement off the eyes they can manipulate a pointer over a keyboard.

Also this is just one way of doing it. I seen earlier experiments that worked simply by making the user think of two widely different things. Using that as calibration and then controlling something by thinking of those two things.

So in fact what you suggest was what they used in one experiment and it worked, tv presentator was capable of doing it with only a few minutes of training.

Flashing lights is just easier to make a working model I guess but in practice this could work for anyone with a working brain and who is capable of receiving input sufficient to learn about this.

Pretty amazing stuff really.

Applications?

I think this is great research, it could give paraplegics (sp?) etc the possibility to walk again with mechanical limbs.

Or am I wrong ??

Oh no

I can see it now...... I am eating ice cream cause my hands are free and i blow the game cause of brain freeze.

Virtual Valerie

Virtual Valerie will never be the same.

Oh great

Instead of my ass growing huge from sitting and playing video games, now my body will atrophy and my head will grow like one of those Talosians [prwdot.org].

typing reply with my brain...

This is cool, but [needsex] not news. I [william shatner's birthday today - how many more?] saw a [excellent cleavage] report on this several years ago. When [is lunch?] do they expect [what kind of underwear is she wearing?] to have a working prototype for [I need a hug] a really cool game [is there coffee?] like Doom3? [needsex]

We had those in the 1970s...

When I was growing up, there were a lot of "ESP Kits" that had crude monitors that supposedly measured brain waves for a new-age fad called "Biofeedback." Mostly they were for helping you get into a medictate trance, but one of them claimed to run a race car slot track based on Alpha Waves (state of relaxed brain activity in mediation), so the the excitiment of winning made you go slower, and not giving a crap whether you won or not made you win. Seemed like a pretty odd balance. That might have been good to learn "the ultimate poker face."

Having never owned one of those biofeedback devices, I can't say if they ever worked, but I saw lots of ads for them in the mid-late 1970s in magazines like Omni and Popular Mechanics.

You can build your own EEG kit

The OpenEEG [sourceforge.net] people aim to create an affordable EEG kit. There's already some schematics for home tinkerers.

Now I feel bad because I didn't pay attention to learning electronics when I was younger...

Hell, I did this 20 years ago...

I simply interfaced [atarihq.com] to my VCS.

not the only one...

There's already a game out there that does this.

the journey to wild divine [wilddivine.com]

It uses biofeedback to control the game, which is a little different than the technique used in this game.

This is similar to the Mind Drive 10 Years ago.

A friend of mine thought he was gonna get rich when he was the manufacturer's rep for a product called The Mind Drive. You could use your thoughts to "think right or left" and these thoughts would register in your finget and be transmitted to the screen as you slalom down a ski slope. It was actually pretty cool Here is a CNET article from 1995. The Mind Drive [com.com]

Does the human brain have limited output potential

I'm curious as to whether the human brain has a limit as to number of outputs. We know that with a feedback device so that a person can see what they're doing, it's possible to teach someone to be able to control characteristics of their brain waves. This could, presumably, be used as an output to control some device. What happens if we just take this higher resolution, add more types of devices Babies don't grow up knowing how to operate their hands and feet -- they have to see them moving and form links to understand what output signals correspond to "leg moved". Why couldn't we do the same with the brain? We wait for particular parts of the brain to be activated at a particular level, and treat that as a signal. I've no idea what kind of bandwidth we're talking about, but if you consider the complexity of talking and that we can deal with going from zero knowledge about talking to learning how to talk properly, that we could manage the same with a brain output device.

It would be nice to be able to type into my computer, to be able to interface in a more efficient manner than putting myself in a particular position, putting my fleshy extensions on a bunch of blocks on a keyboard, and then having the keyboard record how they wiggle and tell the computer.

OTOH, a brain-controlled computer would deprive my fingers of their precious exercise.

Oh, yes...a hands-free headset with goggles, one controlled by the brain, would be terribly cool.

Tech Demo?

I'd certainly consider this interesting material for a tech demo, but can it function within a real game?

A game presumably has to be fun, and its controls conducive to that, and while the controls for a game including this functionality might be a remarkable technical feat, they could also be absolutely infuriating. We'll have to see.

finally!

we finally return to a time where you have to use your brain to play a computer game...

More BCI information

Some further links for more information on Brain-Computer Interfaces:

Upcoming talk and demonstration on the development of Brain-Computer Interfaces: http://www.notacon.org/speakers.html#lowne [notacon.org] (shameless plug)

Invasive, motor-cortical BCI development at Utah: http://www.bioen.utah.edu/cni/Projects/Motor.htm [utah.edu]

Mike Gibbs' work with BCIs at Oxford University's Robotics Group: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mgibbs/research.html [ox.ac.uk]

The Neural Prostheses program at the National Institutes of Health includes calls for proposals in BCI development: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/npp/ [nih.gov]

The University of British Columbia's BCI research group: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~garyb/BCI.htm [ece.ubc.ca]

Results of the 2003 Brain Computer interface competition (focuses on signal processing techniques): http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/projects/bci/compet ition/results/index.html [fraunhofer.de]

BCI development at the Cognitive Science and Technology group at the Helsinki University of Technology: http://www.lce.hut.fi/research/bci/ [lce.hut.fi]

Dr. Jessica Bayliss's BCI work and extensive bibliography (very important, seminal work on BCI development): http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/ [rit.edu] and http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/baylissThesis. pdf [rit.edu]

Dr. Charles Anderson's work at Colorado State University with EEG pattern classification in BCI systems: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/index.html [colostate.edu]

Manchester University's Toby Howard has written some good articles on BCIs, mostly for Popular Science: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/research/bc i/ [man.ac.uk]

Dr. Michael Black at Brown University teaches a course in BCI development: http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs295-7/home.html [brown.edu]

Cyberkinetics, Inc. makes medical-use BCIs: http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/ [cyberkineticsinc.com]

Save your money.

Here's a much cheaper solution.

1) Rent a copy of your favorite game.

2) Invite your most passive friend over for the day.

3) Set him up in front of the console.

4) Now spent the whole afternoon telling him how to play, what he's doing wrong, and generally hurling abuse at him. "Left you fuck! Turn left! Oh look, now you're DEAD!"

Eventually you'll either have complete control over his actions or he'll crack and shove the controller up your ass.

Just pray it's not the original XBox controller.