Thought controlled Oculus Rift

[squibbfire]

Has anyone here heard of Emotiv? Would this be hard to integrate?
Might be worth doing for just forward/ reverse turn movement

The more I think about the oculus rift the more I think people are going to want to "think' to turn and move. Maybe this could fill that gap.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxMux4uEkLI

Product website.
http://www.emotiv.com/

[GeraldT]

I am struggling with myself to order one for years - but look at the video date. They are around for years, and still nobody I know has one so I can test it.

They want A LOT of money for their SDK. They don't seem to target the mainstream - and I am still waiting for the application that truly blows my mind as to what can be achieved. Still no fighter pilots doing it hands-free.

[KBK]

Yes, does anyone know of anything outside of the demo shows and bits by the developers?

Are there any real world videos of it in use?

It is, of course, my suspicion that the HMD may interfere with the subtle signals that the emotiv headset needs to correctly measure.

[Mystify]

I've heard of them, but haven't seen much in the way of it being used for anything. It may be that they just have a stupid barrier to entry that few are willing to take the risk of getting through, it may be that the product really isn't so hot, its hard to say.
The most I've seen was a TV show where they rigged it up to trigger the brakes of a car with a thought. I can't seem to find what show it was or a video of it. I wasn't impressed with the results, it wasn't like "oh, and the car effortlessly went where I wanted it", it was closer to "I could think really hard to send a command to brake".

[GeraldT]

Might be worth checking - they surely know if smartphones interfere with the readings.
Other than that ... no, every couple of months I remember the thing and go hunting, so far nothing has changed.
I have seen they have a newer version now - just 750$ ... it would be so cool to push stuff around just by thought though.

@Mystify - those shows are worthless. You really need to spend time to train on those. There are a few videos where gamers are playing Unreal Tournament with it, so there are cool things possible - but 750$ and 500$ (even more to publish outside their store if I have seen it right) ... to add an option that 1 out of 100000 customers can use after intensive training?

The Emotiv needs a Palmer, someone that recreates it on the cheap, so that the unit price will be under 100$ and the software/sdk open source or at least free.

[virror]

Read somewhere that Palmer had tested it and he said it was very, very hard to get it to work good, not sure what post it was though.
Also i think that taking a lot of money for the SDK is a bad way of marketing such a product : /

[PalmerTech]

I have not been very impressed with the Emotiv headset, or any other low cost EEG headsets.

[squibbfire]

Have you tried it?

Was it crappy like the Mindlex Game.. that just seems to work on its own?

http://www.amazon.com/Mattel-P2639-Mind ... dball+game

[Leahy]

I finally cracked and got one. I don't necessarily recommend it or recommend against it. I have only had a few hours to test it out and it is as far from an out of the box experience as it gets. Nevertheless it still has considerable potential but only for those very determined and patient to deal with the high learning curve. I'll make my own thread once I get a bit more time to experiment.

[GeraldT]

Please do so Leahy! I am really curious about it. They offer a Unity solution in their webshop and I really want one... but not until someone tells me it is worth spending >1000$ on this

[mahler]

I finally cracked and got one. I don't necessarily recommend it or recommend against it. I have only had a few hours to test it out and it is as far from an out of the box experience as it gets. Nevertheless it still has considerable potential but only for those very determined and patient to deal with the high learning curve. I'll make my own thread once I get a bit more time to experiment.

In 1997, I remember using a relatively cheap consumer version of speech recognition for the first time. It wasn't until last year's Google Now, that I was truly impressed by speech recognition. When seeing it in movies and on tv, I was impressed and inspired. The reality was usually far less ideal then you wanted. It took almost 10 years since then to get it right.

Now with virtual reality this might also be the case where it took over 15 years for the first highly promising VR gaming system (Sega/VB) for consumers to mature into a consumer product that isn't more difficult to use than the enjoyment you get out of it.

For thought controlled gaming.... yeah I'm not holding my breath. I love the idea and think it's possible and highly promising, but not any time soon.

[Leahy]

I wrote up a few first impressions that I'll copy and paste to give you an idea of my frustration,

I can see why Palmer called it 'garbage' it's really 'plastic' and flimsy like a low quality toy and the electrode arms are solid and not at all made to be adjustable for different types of heads. This design is much cheaper and less ideal than what I saw a few years ago. It's a damn shame they cheaped out so much, you pay $300 for something you expect a lot more than this. I can see why they haven't advanced much in the 5 years they have been out. I bought this off of ebay 'used only once'. I'm sure a lot of developers saw the potential, ordered it then were put off by the utter lack of adjustability and the 'cheap' feel of the plastic.

Nevertheless, I am still determined to get this thing to work, at least for me. I put it on and I am a couple months behind in getting my hair cut so the electrodes behind the ear (2 of the 4 reference electrodes) aren't getting any signal. I'll have to bug the poop out of the wife to cut my hair and I can continue. Once I get all the electrodes green I will play with their software with the initial goal of mapping WSAD walking.

OK just cut my hair and still no signal from those two electrodes. I tried using it and can move the blocks around with difficulty but without 2 of the 4 main electrodes. Ok user error, the four reference electrodes are actually two redundant pairs and after finding out that the rubber bases of the hinges hid the redundant pair and it could be swapped for the two that weren't getting any signal I finally get all the electrodes green and can retrain everything.

So far in the Emotiv control panel each task is moderately easy to train, however repeating those exact brainwaves outside of the training is proving to be much more difficult as I am noticing that for example it will read 'disappear' when I try to tell it 'rotate right'.

As of yesterday I tried out the Spirit mountain game and I found that it really added an interesting element to gaming however I need to train myself better because after a half hour of trying to pull and lift things I got a headache and had to quit.

The community forums are not at all geared towards our ideas of integrating into VR but there is at least one poster who uses it for gaming I'll quote him

"You can play with out hands indefinitely. You need to specifically train in a specific manner that is not provided for you. The instructions that are provided are not great by any feat nor are they wrong. Well some of it is but that's beside the point. Train wile playing the like normal. Use your fingers and train button by button. Eventually you can use dead keys yet they appear to work.

Confusing?
Most games on PC are wasd when it comes to moving about. So say you train W then trained A then S and then D. Play the game using your Epoc and when you start getting conflicts as in your W (forward key) appears to glitch out as you hit it. This is caused by a double response fro ma keyboard press and emulated Epoc keyboard press. Note some games are really smooth and do not show this glitch just work with it. Next moved your hole hand to the right of the keyboard on to keys that serve as no fuction like TFGH Pretend the (T) is (W), (F) is (A) (G) is (S) and (H) is (D) use the keyboard as you would if it were WASD it will feel about the same with your hand to the right though if it does not work slide your keyboard to the left and your hand will feel as if its truly in the same place. As you press the unresponsive keys the game will proceed to play as you pres even though the keys you are pressing do nothing. Your mind is playing out the same thus your sending a proper signal creating the proper environment you trained. Enough of this and its time to remove your hands from the keyboard and you will find you can still preform. It may take slight play acting with your fingers at first but soon even that fades and if you train to well as I have the game appears to play its self with out conscious thought which BTW can get boring. At first such a thing is so cool as appears to be magic on top of what already appears to be magical. Once a game appears to respond with out thought I like to reset my training to feel a little more manual.

NOTE:
all of this takes dedication. I can say anyone who starts the training process will get frustrated. Once the frustration has passed you will find the device to be more then useful in games.

Supposedly this device can not respond on things such as changing a weapon upon hear the nose of dry fire in a shooter game. I disagree and proved this to myself long before it was claimed otherwise on these forums. Simply train while hearing the noise it may take several times however once you succeed you not need any more training for it. As soon as you hear the nose and have set your controls it will set it off to preform as you have trained. This can be done for any noise for any reason. Think of the possibility of this ability to speed up your response times in games. Its something the developers claim their product is not capable of. Its like they disregard how wonderful there product truly is. I know for a fact if you train right your level of outperforming traditional players will outperform 10 fold.

I took my own device to a friends place. I let him use it and with my help in how to train I got him walking in in game in all directions with in an hour." Eric Troglin

[Leahy]

I finally cracked and got one. I don't necessarily recommend it or recommend against it. I have only had a few hours to test it out and it is as far from an out of the box experience as it gets. Nevertheless it still has considerable potential but only for those very determined and patient to deal with the high learning curve. I'll make my own thread once I get a bit more time to experiment.

In 1997, I remember using a relatively cheap consumer version of speech recognition for the first time. It wasn't until last year's Google Now, that I was truly impressed by speech recognition. When seeing it in movies and on tv, I was impressed and inspired. The reality was usually far less ideal then you wanted. It took almost 10 years since then to get it right.

Now with virtual reality this might also be the case where it took over 15 years for the first highly promising VR gaming system (Sega/VB) for consumers to mature into a consumer product that isn't more difficult to use than the enjoyment you get out of it.

For thought controlled gaming.... yeah I'm not holding my breath. I love the idea and think it's possible and highly promising, but not any time soon.

I agree for the most part. Actually due to the fact that everyone's brain is so different I really doubt that this will even catch on in another 10 years. This actually won the best of E3 4 or 5 years ago and things haven't really progressed much since except that in some time now we'll get dry electrodes.. I think this is an amazing addition to every hard core enthusiasts' collection of peripherals however I don't see this tech ever becoming something really consumer friendly

[GeraldT]

Thank you Leahy, that was a very interesting read. I am very curious on your long time experiences!

I do like the training methods you described.
About that hearing thing - so your brains shows the same pattern after hearing the same thing? Do I get that right?

[Leahy]

As I understand it hearing a dry fire then the stimulus response that follows ie. clicking R for reload generates a unique enough signal to emulate. That said this encourages 'half-motions' like miming tapping the side of a sim gun then the bottom to mime changing a magazine. I think what he was saying is that miming isn't even required but I think with an imaginative control mapping it could fill in the gaps we find for different games

[GeraldT]

Ahh ... now I get it. I did not know what "dry fire" meant.

Thank you and keep us in the loop!

[Linkage1992]

I finally cracked and got one. I don't necessarily recommend it or recommend against it. I have only had a few hours to test it out and it is as far from an out of the box experience as it gets. Nevertheless it still has considerable potential but only for those very determined and patient to deal with the high learning curve. I'll make my own thread once I get a bit more time to experiment.

In 1997, I remember using a relatively cheap consumer version of speech recognition for the first time. It wasn't until last year's Google Now, that I was truly impressed by speech recognition. When seeing it in movies and on tv, I was impressed and inspired. The reality was usually far less ideal then you wanted. It took almost 10 years since then to get it right.

Now with virtual reality this might also be the case where it took over 15 years for the first highly promising VR gaming system (Sega/VB) for consumers to mature into a consumer product that isn't more difficult to use than the enjoyment you get out of it.

For thought controlled gaming.... yeah I'm not holding my breath. I love the idea and think it's possible and highly promising, but not any time soon.

The makers of the Muse EEG headset have said that while theirs is good for tasks which require concentration, making it sensitive enough to control in game characters is around 10 years away, so that's pretty much right within your line of thinking.

[squibbfire]

I wonder if you could get it to recognize the thought to run forward.....then translate that into a W key, many "w"'s or even autowalk...

[Linkage1992]

I wonder if you could get it to recognize the thought to run forward.....then translate that into a W key, many "w"'s or even autowalk...

You can definitely do this today, however it would be cumbersome. When you're controlling a character in-game, you never have to concentrate on which direction you want to move in- it's an automatic reaction, just like walking. Once the headsets are sensitive enough to read the motor signals which the brain sends to our limbs and fingers in order to move, then it will be viable for most games. This is probably about 10 years out.

[Pyry]

It may take slight play acting with your fingers at first but soon even that fades and if you train to well as I have the game appears to play its self with out conscious thought which BTW can get boring. At first such a thing is so cool as appears to be magic on top of what already appears to be magical. Once a game appears to respond with out thought I like to reset my training to feel a little more manual.

This raises an interesting point, which is that if the Emotiv worked perfectly, maybe the experience would just be completely unsatisfying since it wouldn't feel like you were 'doing' anything, because the normal hand-eye-coordination feedback loop had been bypassed. In the worst case, it might be like watching a video of yourself playing a video game, since you would agree with all the decisions the character makes, but you wouldn't feel in control of them.

[Pontianak]

Yes, does anyone know of anything outside of the demo shows and bits by the developers?

Are there any real world videos of it in use?

It is, of course, my suspicion that the HMD may interfere with the subtle signals that the emotiv headset needs to correctly measure.

I'm not sure how "Real world" this is, but I know there is some research in using this with a HMD for a VR environment. An example below, but I think they are using a VR Cave with Stero 3D instead of a HMD. We are getting there, but more work does need to be done for sure. The guy has a big grin on his face though, so I guess that is something! lol

[youtube-hd]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3tgc4-pibc[/youtube-hd]