Brain Waves Control Video Game
From: BBC News - 03/24/2004
From: Jo Twist

Researchers at MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin recently demonstrated a
thought-controlled video game system called Mind Balance, whose potential
applications include gaming as well as brain-computer interfaces for
handicapped users. The demo involved a user wearing a wireless headset dubbed
Cerebus that employs direct electroencephalography (EEG), cerebral data
nodes, and Bluetooth, offering a less invasive interface than the direct
brain-computer connections and implants popularized in science fiction and
being pursued by research labs worldwide. Six distinct nodes are placed over
the user's occipital lobes where light, vision, and hallucinations are
processed, and the player concentrates on a pair of checkered boxes that
flash at different frequencies on either side of a large screen, thus
stimulating different responses in the user's cortex, according to MIT Media
Lab Europe research associate Ed Lalor. "Tuning" into the boxes in turn
controls the movements of a virtual character walking a tightrope. "We are
able to pick up electrical activity on the scalp and take the brain activity
into a C# signal-processing engine which analyzes those signals in real time
and makes a decision which of the two boxes the player is looking at," Lalor
explains. He believes the Cerebus device could be adapted for video game
players as it becomes simpler to use and more aesthetically appealing. "One
of the obvious applications is for someone who is locked in or paralyzed
completely, somebody who has an advanced case of ALS [Amyotrophic Lateral
Sclerosis], where they literally cannot communicate at all, but their brain
is operating fine," Lalor adds. The brain-computer interface would give such
users the means to communicate. 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3485918.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/3485918.stm

http://www.medialabeurope.org/research/group.php?id=7