GDC08: Emotiv 'brain control' headset shows its kinks
by James Ransom-Wiley 
{ Feb 20th 2008 at 4:30AM }
Nam explained that the machine could read feeling and emotion, things that "distinguish us from humans ... er, computers!" An assistant, Marco, entered stage right sporting Emotiv's neuro-headset, a mess of tentacled sensors wrapped around his temple, as Nam introduced Marco's virtual counterpart, Emobot. A robot head with a cute, round face began to mimic Marco's facial expressions on a large screen behind Nam. "Look cute, look cute," goaded Nam, and Marco and the Emobot responded, blinking their eyes and pursing their lips. Emobot followed along for a few more moments before freezing up -- and it was onto the next demonstration.
Nam pressed Marco to "think of something, and make it happen" by manipulating a three-dimensional cube now occupying the center screen. A simple 'zoom' command seemingly worked, but when told to mind-push the cube along multiple axes, Marco failed. "Weak mind, weak mind," teased Nam, warding off the inevitable tension. He filled the pause with pseudo-science, something about electrical impulses converted into an image of thought within a roughly 90,000-dimensional space. (90,000 dimensions? Had we heard that right?) Marco was still squeezing his eyes shut, carefully molding thoughts with his hands. Still nothing ... and then ... the cube spun briefly to life.
"You feeling okay to do the risky one?" Nam asked. (No, it was not a question.)
Gallery: Emotiv Brain Computer Interface
Marco was focusing again ... still straining ... trying to will the cube to disappear. "Performance anxiety," joked Nam, "just press a button, come on." The laughs faded into silence as minutes passed. Nam paced, Marco curled his brow. Finally! The cube was gone.
The tension carried over into the nerves of Lori Washbon, director of design, as she struggled through detailing the EPOC headset, adjusting her slipping shoulder strap, sometimes strutting the stage with wayward poses. The big breakthrough: no more gel! The sensors are made from a proprietary material that takes EEG readings without the messy cleanup. And a lithium polymer battery adds 12 hours of goop-free usage. "A new 'epoc' in man to machine interface."
An urgent request followed: Please switch off your mobile phones, they're interfering with our wireless ... (Yikes!)
"Can we do it without the headset?" Nam whispered into his mic from off-stage. Producer Zachary Drake had hopped up to demonstrate the game, developed in partnership with Demiurge Studios. (Each headset will ship with this tech demo, call it: Emotiv's 'Wii Sports.') "Welcome to demo hell, folks!" Drake grinned, clutching a wireless Xbox 360 controller. Drake began navigating through the game, a "cloud-top temple," pausing at certain points, asking us to imagine what would occur had he been wearing the neuro-headset, twisting and stretching his face into hypothetical game commands. What irony! He chased off a swarm of glowing demon spirits, lifted a giant boulder and transformed the sky from serene green to a "brilliant orange" -- all in our minds!
After Drake's brave presentation, Nam returned to rush through a series of announcements:
- EmoKey -- "mind control for existing PC games"; keyboard emulation software that maps actions onto the headset; "If you are Jedi, you have the real force," teased Nam.
- The SDK will be open standard; available to developers free from Emotiv's website
- IBM partnership; Michael Rowe, an IBM "3D Internet Champion," is looking to implement Emotiv's game tech "for real business usage."
Nam sheepishly closed by revealing an optimistic target release date in "holiday 2008" and a $299 price tag for the neuro-wonder EPOC. "May the force be with you -- it's not with me today ... but it's the thought that counts."
[Follow-up: Emotiv's PR issued a brief statement which linked the technical disaster to the AV crews headsets. "The sound crew's AV headsets use a very high power, frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum technology which is not found in consumer devices or home wireless set-ups."]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Chase @ Feb 20th 2008 4:39AM
Another thing that distinguishes us from computers? Visible genitalia.
I'm still waiting for the complementary gaming peripheral.
"Mommy, 'Donkey Kong's Donkey Show' doesn't work without the Wiinis controller. Mommy, I need a Wiinis!"
^future
MONJZILLA @ Feb 20th 2008 5:12AM
that was just dumb.
Laggy @ Feb 20th 2008 5:40AM
I beg to differ.
Lone Starr @ Feb 20th 2008 9:50AM
Monjzilla has Wiinis envy.
SID SPACE @ Feb 20th 2008 4:46AM
Well that sounds kinda like ... it doesn't work.
Good luck with that $299 price tag.
jdeuel @ Feb 20th 2008 9:50AM
yeah, price is what killed the novint falcon too, and it actually worked
Syn @ Feb 20th 2008 5:18AM
I am David Blaine, Watch me levitate!
SID SPACE @ Feb 20th 2008 5:32AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYxu_MQSTTY
TrojanGuy @ Feb 20th 2008 5:45AM
I hear the PS4 is going to be able to render 90,000 dimensions. Now that they've figured out how to do 4D with the PS3, the sky's the limit!
mr mobius @ Feb 20th 2008 6:25AM
This is hilarious. Lets just stick to motion sensor for now and if we really want, implement games with stereoscopic (3D) glasses.
It should be good for future though if they can get it working and it can also work on the weak minded. Would open up all sorts of sandbox games but then that would involve the re-invention of the imagination.
V1L3 @ Feb 20th 2008 7:12AM
As funny as this all sounds, it would be truly disappointing if the technology DOES work and is incredible, and the technical difficulties that plagued this presentation have soured everyone against it.
Think about it. If you knew the headset only had, say, a 5% chance of working, would YOU get up in front of hundreds of people to demonstrate it?
JRB @ Feb 20th 2008 8:36AM
I saw some in house demo video of it working a while back on like youtube. They played some game where they picked up and threw boxes. And it appeared to actually work.
JRB @ Feb 20th 2008 8:49AM
Here's one such demo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxMux4uEkLI
It does show that it's a little flaky.
Gerwurztraminer @ Feb 20th 2008 7:44AM
Is that the controller for the Phantom?
Jerk Face @ Feb 20th 2008 9:25AM
Ha ha... I see what you did there!
Rususeruru @ Feb 20th 2008 8:52AM
ok I feel better.
Rususeruru @ Feb 20th 2008 8:53AM
that was suppose to say "insert sexist joke about women and mind reading" btw
Dustin @ Feb 21st 2008 3:47AM
It came out more like "Insert joke about inserting sexist joke"
Thomas @ Feb 20th 2008 10:16AM
Unfortunately, it's difficult to get this kind of technology working well. Not just this product, but any "mind reading" interface will prove to be impractical for gaming.
It's basically a machine learning problem, which can be very powerful but only after intense training. Speech recognition is very similar. Everyone's voice is different; hence Dragon Naturally Speaking and others require you to train the software first -- let it learn the unique characteristics of your voice. Not only that, but to an extent you have to train yourself (to enunciate, for instance, or to avoid words outside its vocabulary). The feedback is critical.
It's even harder for brain control interfaces. At least in speech, we have a common language. But there's no first principles prediction of what goes on in a brain that thinks "zoom in." And the signals that would register on an EEG when I think "zoom in" now or at another time are not guaranteed to be very similar. You need a lot of information to link brain pattern "X" to thought "Y." Hence (what I assume is) a 90,000-dimensional feature space, which Nam Do proudly showcases without realizing he's actually confessing to susceptibility to a well-known machine learning phenomenon: the curse of dimensionality.
Marco surely spent a lot of time training days or weeks before the show. Undoubtedly, he suffered endlessly frustrating trial and error before he could gain even rudimentary control that cube or whatever. My guess is he was nervous in front of the audience, and this affected his brainwave patterns ever so slightly but enough to throw the software off. Weak mind, indeed.
Brain control interfaces have outstanding potential, for instance to help physically disabled people communicate. But they are absolutely useless for complex game controls.
Crono (NDF - Knight of the Old School) @ Feb 20th 2008 10:40AM
You know, it is possible that they were having technical difficulties. Alot (but not all) of what you bring up can be corrected and adjusted for in complex logic control on the hardware.
I'd like to see floor impressions of this device. Maybe I'm being too soft, but I generally like to give people the benefit of the doubt.
NATO_Duke @ Feb 20th 2008 10:41AM
If marco was just nervous, wouldn't the makers have used that as the excuse rather than the sound people's headsets? I think your speculation shot right past what those involved said happened.
Thomas @ Feb 20th 2008 12:31PM
You're absolutely right. It's easy to get carried away with speculation. It could be environmental EM interference. But I'm still skeptical about the usefulness of this device for gaming.
ThornedVenom (Ludwig Defense Force) @ Feb 20th 2008 2:49PM
The brain interface should adapt more to the user than the user should adapt to the interface.
Otherwise it'd be accounted as useless and impractical.
NATO_Duke @ Feb 20th 2008 10:39AM
Part of me really would like to see this work, while part of me doesn't like the idea of controls using brain waves - besides being creepy, it just doesn't seem as fun to play by thinking rather than handling and trying to master physical controls.
Mr.ESC @ Feb 20th 2008 11:32AM
Why after reading this I felt like I'm staring at the virtual boy.
Do Want!
Actually if they get support from mayor software companies I'll buy this,$299 for a Brain controller doesn't sound s bad...if it works.
(Mentor,The Mind taker reference here)
Misquito @ Feb 20th 2008 1:52PM
Crecente at Kotaku had "heads on" time with the device and from my understanding it worked fairly well for him after the initial set up.
http://kotaku.com/358237/mind-over-no-matter-hands+on-with-the-psychic-controller
ThornedVenom (Ludwig Defense Force) @ Feb 20th 2008 2:50PM
This was expected, but I highly encourage them to keep on experimenting and improving their technology.
This could be the interface of the future, but definitely not of today yet.
GameGrrrl @ Feb 21st 2008 12:06AM
They were just having technical difficulties. The AV workers' wireless headsets had a signal that interfered with the Emotiv wireless headset. Go to the Emotiv booth at GDC and try it out for yourself. It DOES work and it's freaky.
Ray Riches @ Feb 28th 2008 4:33AM
Please may you send me more information about the Emotiv's neuro-headset,and how it works.It a great idel and I would like to trial one one two see it working, please may on how much it cost and came I buy one in the Great Britain Uk
Yours Sincerely
Mr Ray Riches