A visit to San Jose. California.
It is all so simple: Lets make a device, where an Attention meter reads how attentive the user is feeling, and where a Meditation meter reads how relaxed the user
is feeling. And let us, for a moment, not care to much about other conscious thoughts and lets just treat facial
expressions as a noise, and lets sell this device to people for a bargain price!
The NeuroSky Toolkit - October 2009
When I first read about NeuroSkys [1] Mindset back in 2008 I was absolutely flabbergasted!
You could really do all of these things!- And that was before I read about computer games like Judecca (a first person shooter game utilizing NeuroSky technology). And before I realized that NeuroSky is also working on a more advanced version of their headset. One that includes head and eye tracking plus stereo sound, in addition to the EEG...
Later, on a trip to San Francisco in October 2009, I had the good fortune to visit NeuroSky Headquarters in San Jose.
It was a day of wonder, where NeuroSky communications manager Tansy Brook showed me...
Experiments with the NeuroSky Toolkit - April 2010
In the Force Trainer game your aim is to focus.
Achieve the right brain rhythm and a fan switches on, lifting the ball inside the tube.No hands, no legs, just a headset that detect brainsignals allows your mind to lift the ball! Sure, reading EEG brainwaves used to be a laborious affair with electrically conductive gels and clunky, unattractive (and expensive) headsets in a lab environment. NeuroSkys breakthrough was making it all much simpler and putting the technology inside a toy. Making sense of the received EEG signal was another challenge. Here, NeuroSkys software within the toy utilizes that the ''concentration'' and ''meditation'' electrical (brain) states are broadly distinguished from each other, and those states influence the entire front of the brain. Making it possible for the toy to decode whether a player is concentrating or meditating... Focus and the ball might go up inside the tube...
Time for some experiments! I called Jan over and videotaped our Force Trainer day...
Misc. Links
- Predicting the Future: Long Bets
- Towards: Rapture with Constraints
- Arthur C. Clarkes: 3001 Braincap
Brain Interfacing
- 07-02-2010
Neural Interfaces: Interfacing directly to the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) with tech along the lines of e.g. the Utah Electrode Array (in order to regulate mood disorders, epilepsy and Parkinsons symptoms) is certainly a very invasive technology, compared to listening to EEG signals... - 14-05-2010
Minds in the 21st century: Ray Kurzweil explores mankinds ultimate destiny in the bestseller The Singularity is Near. How we will eventually transcend our biology, understand how the mind works, build new brains, and be able to augment human cognition with brain prostheses
- and much more...
