VR development in the next decade: or replace the controller with brain waves

When using a VR helmet, with brainwave reading technology, you don't need to use a controller anymore.

Twenty years ago, Dan Cook began exploring the commercial potential of brainwave technology, when his partners included a government agency that wanted to develop better lie detectors, and pharmaceutical companies that wanted to understand the effects of drugs on nerves. .

VR development in the next decade: or replace the controller with brain waves

In 1993, VR was nothing more than a whimsical geek, or a novelty in Hollywood, like the dystopian futurist scene in The Lawnmower Man. But Cook's vision has always been to develop avatars that are directly driven by the signals of the human brain. His postgraduate thesis at the University of California at Berkeley is about the application of cognitive neuroscience at the forefront of business.

As virtual reality moves to the mainstream, Cook believes that it is time to let brainwave reading technology work. His company EyeMynd hopes to create an operating system that transforms brain waves into behavior in the VR world. No cell phone, no controller - you can rely on the thoughts in your head to roam in the virtual world.

"After ten years, this will become obvious," Cook said. He is full of confidence and enthusiasm for his invention. "The computer is growing at a rapid rate. Later we can detect and interpret all the signals in the brain in real time... We know how to pick up all the signals sent by the brain to the body, all the sensory information, all the cognitive and emotional information."

The EyeMynd team has offices in Salt Lake City and San Francisco, and Cook’s younger brother Knight (Psychology Psychology graduate) and David Traub (Voice VR consultant) are company backbone. EyeMynd plans to launch a helmet in the spring of 2017 to monitor brainwaves using an 16-electroencephalogram (EEG) sensor. The development version of the Brainwave VR helmet will be compatible with HTC Vive (a mainstream VR helmet) and will work with EyeMynd's Brainwave OS operating system to convert the helmet's EEG readings into computer commands.

The first version of this helmet, the development version mentioned earlier, is aimed at developers, with the goal of providing them with a toolkit to design applications using the company's brain-reading capabilities. Cook did not disclose details such as the price and release date of the device, but he said the helmet would be the most comfortable of its kind on the market.

The helmet also comes with a simple game called "Smile with Lucy", which is actually a personalized brain calibration tutorial. The calibration process took an hour, Cook said, but in the near future it will be shortened to three minutes. In the game, the player simulates the facial expressions of the avatar, and EyeMynd's software monitors the player's unique brainwave pattern—that is, the tiny “pattern recognition” that our brain produces when we see, feel, touch, or move something. "signal.

Consumer interest in VR accessories is growing, and EyeMynd hopes to take advantage of this trend. But Cook believes that a decade's computer interface only requires the use of brain sensors, so some of the current VR accessories (such as motion sensors, hand controllers, head-mounted accelerometers and cameras) will be deprecated.

"The key to understanding our brainwave operating system is to think about your dreams," he said. “In a dream, you can run without actually moving your limbs. This dream and imagination creates a brain signal that we can read. Our vision is that you don’t need to use the eyeball to see it, you don’t need to use your ear. Can listen, also need hands and feet. We can bypass all of this.

EyeMynd is not the only company that wants to bring brainwave technology to market. Companies such as EmoTIv and NeuroSky have released EEG head-mounted helmets for scientific use. Other companies are developing marketing and advertising applications, and some analysts are already analyzing data from VR sensors to track people's reactions to advertising. Directly tracking the user's subconscious physical and emotional response to the ad, if this can be done, it will become a holy grail in the advertising field.

"VR content providers and practitioners in this new field lack a reliable way to tell if they are impressing users," said Charles Miller of New Orleans' yotta.io. "We focus on Marketing area – providing them with real hard data and quantitative metrics.”

Cook and the team hope to apply their brainwave technology to the medical and educational fields. However, no matter what the definition of the category of business brainwave technology, many people have a skeptical attitude towards its future. Most neuroscientists say that the brain's electrical signals can be "read" in the laboratory with a certain degree of accuracy, but only at a certain level of invasive surgery.

Jack Gallant, head of the Garland Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, said: "This is a trivial matter, but it's almost impossible to do it." He said the process was still It involves huge computing power and is very expensive both in terms of time and money. "The problem with decoding EEG signals outside the brain is that the skull is a terrible filter."

However, Dan Cook will not let skeptics hinder his 20 years of hard work. Most of his time in 2016 was spent on raising funds and contacting manufacturing partners. He plans to open an office in China in 2017 and ship the development helmet to developers in the spring.

Cook said that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly expressed the vision of "brain-to-brain communication." "Zuckerberg understands that this is our future, but I don't think he understands how close we are to this future. He looks ahead on a yearly basis, and we are on a monthly basis."

Cook said that VR simulation is only the beginning of a journey, and humans will find on this journey that our entire experience is nothing more than a simulation. The fantasy of computer scientists seems to be a popular opinion among some tech giants, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

“VR allows us to subtly create fantasy, pursue and enjoy a unique human experience,” Cook said. "This provides an opportunity for human beings to truly understand themselves.

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