

Brain-computer interfaces creep closer to bionic, mecha dream - ukdm
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/102927-brain-computer-interfaces-creep-closer-to-bionic-mecha-dream

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lars
I'm doing a master thesis on EEG classification. Some thoughts:

1) The term Brain-Computer Interface is not made up for this article, it is
the accepted name for this kind of thing in academia.

2) Their 85% accuracy is not classification accuracy, but how many rings the
user was able to get through. It's impossible to tell what this says about the
accuracy of their classifier.

3) From skimming their paper, it seems like their classification approach is
fairly simple. They do not learn a spatial filter for instance.

4) As far as I know, the article is correct in saying that this is the first
BCI to allow navigation in 3D space. This is very cool, and I hope they
release the code for it.

To sum it up, this is a very cool practical application. From what I can tell
it does nothing ground breaking in order to do classification, and I bet a
more computationally intensive approach to classification could perform
substantially better.

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Udo
The claim that this is the first time an EEG array was used to control
something directly with human thoughts is a very bold lie. Also, "true" BCI
does not generally mean what they think it means. While it is correct that
electrode arrays are _some_ form of brain-computer-interface, they are a very
crude tool and have nothing in common with the imagery that is being invoked
here for the sake of publicity. A real BCI is supposed to be bidirectional and
it's supposed to interface with individual neurons or cortical columns.

~~~
Udo
> _The 'first' claim here is moving in 3D space. Controlling pixels on a
> screen has been done before -- and in many ways, this development is
> basically the same thing. The researchers make it sound like 'continuous and
> real-time' are also significant developments, along with the 3D thing._ <

Mrsebastian, in case you didn't know: you appear to be hellbanned so I can't
reply to you directly.

You are correct, the newness claim is centered around the 3D thing, but I'm
very skeptical of that claim as well. Using cortical electrodes to control
things is so old a method you can't really slap a marketing label on it
("look, this time we control XYZ! it's NEW!1!") and call it new. In any case,
it's grossly misleading to hype this as groundbreaking research.

~~~
mrsebastian
Hrm, the hellbanning is news to me -- I thought an administrator would send me
an email if that was the case! Thanks for the heads-up, though.

Again, I don't think the fact that they've controlled something via trained
brain waves is the news here -- as you say, that's fairly old hat. The fact
that it's being done in real time and very accurately is impressive, though, I
thought.

~~~
Udo
Strange, this post of yours seems normal, the previous one was auto-dead.

I stand by my opinion that the way this research is being presented is
misleading and blown out of proportion. That doesn't mean, however,
controlling stuff with EEG is not awesome. It is.

I must admit that I don't understand what the realtime claim in this case is
supposed to be though. While there is always overhead due to signal
processing, the reaction time is also tied to how much data you need to
reflect a state change with enough confidence to trigger whatever the output
device is. There is a lot of inherent inaccuracy in this measurement process,
which makes sense when you consider the electrode's distance from the EM
emitter and the tissue in between. So what does realtime and accuracy actually
mean in this case?

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diiq
"Surprizingly fast and mind-blowingly accurate"? I would not, in a million
years, describe the flight in that video using those words. I'm glad the
research is being done, but there's no reason to sensationalize something
that's _clearly_ performing worse than, say, a joystick. Or a laptop touchpad.
Or four hard-to-press buttons.

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zopf
Does the video remind anyone of the secret level in Super Mario 64 triggered
by looking up into the sun? Flying through rings and all...

This one: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0NXA7uJj58>

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politician
Off topic, but speaking of hellbanning and auto-dead, I'm also not able to
reply to any comments along Udo's thread (i.e. the thread starting with
comment <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3186917>). Why is that?

~~~
stonemetal
Looking at your post time it would appear to be the cool off timer. To prevent
deeply nested back and forth each level of nesting in a thread introduces a
delay for replies. Come back latter, and it will probably come back.

