
Awesome new (relatively inexpensive) Brain-Computer Interface - speek
http://emotivepoc.com/index.php
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jcl
_Please note that the developer headset and the EPOC consumer headsets are a
separate line of hardware products and are not interchangeable. The developer
headset supports development whereas the consumer headsets ($299) will only
work with approved applications._

Or: "Please pay us an additional $200 for the chance to create anything that
would create a demand for our product." No mention of the cost of "approval".

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anotherjesse
I guess I should have read the fine print. I ordered the $300 device after
they sent an email a couple months ago.

It supposedly has shipped and will arrive any moment - I didn't realize it
would be cripple-ware

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wvenable
From the description, these are still the full headsets you get with the other
editions, you just don't get the SDK. You might not have that much trouble
hacking it. Once it's in your hands, you can start sniffing the USB traffic.
They say it doesn't require a driver, so it's probably a USB HID device which
is even better and easier to work with.

You might still get pretty far even without the SDK. Once it arrives, you
could post here on Hackernews for some help. I have a bit of experience
reverse-engineering USB devices, but I'm sure there are others here that could
help even more.

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klipt
Looks like you can achieve near 100% accuracy with one caveat - the electrodes
have to be inside your skull, not on top of it:
[http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/12/23/1511251/Typing-W...](http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/12/23/1511251/Typing-
With-Your-Brain)

>>...an experiment involving two patients with epilepsy. Both patients were
already being monitored for seizure activity using electrocorticography
(ECoG), in which a sheet of electrodes is laid directly on the surface of the
brain. This procedure requires a craniotomy, a surgical incision into the
skull. Dr. Shih and colleagues hypothesized that feedback from electrodes
placed directly on the brain would be much more specific than data collected
with EEG (electroencephalography) alone, in which electrodes are placed on the
scalp. Most studies of mind-machine interaction have occurred with EEG. "There
is a big difference in the quality of information you get from ECoG compared
to EEG. The scalp and bony skull diffuses and distorts the signal, rather like
how the Earth's atmosphere blurs the light from stars," says Dr. Shih. "That's
why progress to date on developing these kinds of mind interfaces has been
slow."<<

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moron4hire
I don't know, it seems an awful lot like listening to a conference hall for
one user's voice commands in an unknown language. Brain-wave activity is
largely unknown, not understood, and noisy as hell. There isn't even any
concrete evidence that distinct portions of the brain are singularly or wholly
responsible for specific tasks. Anything we do related to the brain in this
period of human development is not much more than witch doctoring.

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clistctrl
I'm only theorizing here, but I don't think its trying to look at a specific
part of the brain, then determine what you're thinking. It seems to me like
there are common actions people can perform that render similar results across
everyone (for example it seems like smiling is one) if that is true then you
simply need to train the computer what your particular brain looks like after
performing this action. Once you have that, you simply map that action to your
desired output. The concept is simple (though i'm sure the implementation is
wildly complex)

~~~
jcl
_it seems like smiling is one_

Smiling is perhaps a bad example, since it contracts a muscle near the
sensors. When someone is smiling, it's probably hard to detect anything else.

~~~
joeyo

      > Smiling is perhaps a bad example, since it contracts a 
      > muscle near the sensors.
    

This is no doubt intentional.

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chaosmachine
It's exciting to think where this could take us in 10 years.

Remember the first mp3 players?
<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0b/Rio_pmp300.jpg>

Now we have stuff like this: <http://i50.tinypic.com/30cn1va.jpg>

Computer assisted telepathy, here we come.

~~~
fbailey
you are comparing a mp3 player with a tiny computer, would make much more
sense to compare it to a large computer

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mariorz
i'm dubious these things can accurately interpret anything more than face
muscle tensions, eye-movement if that. which are common noise sources in EEG
recordings

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#Artifact...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#Artifacts)

anyone have some anecdotes otherwise? the demos on youtube are not really
satisfying.

~~~
figital
You can eliminate noise/artifact like that by subtracting it from a reference
point.

~~~
mariorz
but they don't seem to be doing that since "expressive" is one of the
detection aspects they mention.

~~~
figital
I think that's just "eyebrows went up, smiling muscles contracted, blinked",
etc. for the look-my-emoticon-changed marketing effect. They also claim
there's a gyroscope in the device.

The more advanced EEG tech is quite real. It's a stretch to say that it's
interacting with your "thoughts" ... making something like PacMan move
forward/backward is a similar sensation to when you first figured out how to
wiggle your nose (the mental exercise, not the muscle movement).

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motters
Looks nice, and I've seen the Marvin Minsky demo, but the fact that there is
no Linux version means it would probably be useless to me. I'm not sure how
practical these interfaces will turn out to be, other than for entertainment
purposes.

~~~
jimfl
The fact that there is no linux version is no impediment to determined
hackers.

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figital
I've taken various classes in Neurofeedback interaction design. The biggest
obstacle to getting work done was the frustration of hooking electrodes up to
your own scalp. Also, circa 2005 the lowest barrier of entry for interactivity
was through a Flash gateway in the BioExplorer IDE
(<http://www.cyberevolution.com>) ... whereas now I think with Air you could
send event messages to something like processing.js, flot, jQuery, HTML5
<audio/video>, sparklines, etc.

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neurotech1
I'm an EEG technician, with a background in electronics and programming. I use
BioExplorer for neurofeedback routinely.

I suspect that the emotiv system relies on conditioning (eg. if i do action
"A" - the computer moves the pointer up on the screen), not real EEG pattern
recognition.

For the record, BioEra (www.bioera.net) does have support OCZ NIA system -
cheaper, and no developer road-blocks.

BTW Your 100% on the mark about reducing artifacts. There is no substitute for
a good connection to the scalp.

Edit: www.bioera.net for details

~~~
figital
@neurotech1 : Thanks for the BioEra link. Hadn't heard of it.

Have you run into any development tools that will allow you to send threshold
triggers quickly enough to a web browser rendering engine?? (like BioExplorer
does with their Flash gateway)

~~~
neurotech1
You could probably hack Javascript function to work with the BioEra XMLServer.
Something vaguely similar to AJAX but I wouldn't consider it "standard" AJAX
programming.

