Brain Computer Interface for $300?
March 3rd, 2008Can this be real? I used to work for a company that designed EEG systems. It was run by top shelf, Big Deal neuroscientists, etc., and those guys would would have viewed the system described below as reverse engineered alien technology from Area 51. That would have been 2000-2001.
But in 2008, there will be a viable brain computer interface available for $300!?
My guess is that the terminator industrial complex (universities with backing from DARPA) will use this cheap box to conduct rapid prototyping of new automated killing technologies.
Via: Overclock3D:
Codenamed the Neural Impulse Actuator (or nia for short), OCZ captivated audiences by seemingly being able to use brain power to control the motion of a character in the the popular FPS Unreal Tournament.
Neural Impulse ActuatorWhile details of how it worked at the time were quite sketchy with many people taking guesses at whether it was actually controlled by brainwaves or facial expressions/muscle movements, today (after seeing the device in action on a one-on-one basis) we’ve got some further information on the unit along with some pictures of what you can expect from the retail version once it starts shipping.
How does it work?
Obviously the biggest question that has been on everyone’s minds (excuse the pun) is how does it work? While it has to be said that a lot of the information fed to us by Dr. Michael Schuette (Neurobioligist & OCZ VP of Technology) went well over our heads (here we go again – Ed), we managed to extract from the conversation that the nia works by reading bioptentials. These include activities of the brain, the autonomous nervous system and muscles – all of which are captured using embrace sensors located on the nia’s headband, amplified and sent to the PC via USB2.0.
OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator
The biopotentials are broken into frequency specific components that allow a reasonably fine granularity of control for the novice user, after a short period of adaptation, the controls become essentially a streaming of body signals into the computer that don’t really require any further “thinking” but become sort of second nature.
Until recently this analysis required a great deal of processing power, meaning that in a uni-processor environment the game running on a users PC would often be competing for CPU resources against the nia application. However, thanks to the popularity of multi-core processors, the software is now able to offload a lot of the “decoding” to other cores in the processor improving the performance of the multi-threaded application.
Related: Pentagon to Merge Next-Gen Binoculars With Soldiers’ Brains
