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After installing the NIA you just follow the help screens and the included
pong game usually gives you a fast "hey it works" feeling. But if you think you finally
found a way to prove that your head contains a brain, you are wrong^^:
The NIA can distinguish 4 kinds of signals: alpha / beta brain waves
and what medical EEGs call artifacts, signals from facial muscles and
eye movements. The Pong game uses your facial muscles! The jaw works here
best for most people and so eating pizza can become tricky.
Anyway^^ the facial muscle part is the easiest to control
and like all so called brainfingers not a simple on off switch, it is
analog so that you can control the speed and direction in the pong game.
All Brainfingers are analog and there are enough to control 2 flight simulator
games simultaneously ... but just in theory. The hardware could do it but the software
only allows to map keyboard actions to brainfinger zones. For example:
You relax your yaw and your character sits down, you bite carefully and the character
walks, the next zone could hold down the arrow key to run or press space
every 0.x seconds to jump. I should mention here that using your facial muscles is actually faster then
using your hand. The reason is that the signal path between your brain
and your hand is longer and creates lag. You never noticed
arm lag? Easy to explain: Your brain cheats^^
While controlling something
with the jaw is easy, it is much harder to control the alpha and beta brain waves.
Controlling them together is like controlling your heartbeat, to influence
the waves individually is very difficult and requires a lot of training.
Even if you manage to learn that, the alpha and beta waves will always react too slow
for fast games, even worse, using them may make it pointless to play at all: They
draw too much attention away from the game.
Last but not least to the last
kind of brainfinger, the EOG (ElectroOculoGraphic) signal. They are the
lowest frequency signals used and most are related to eye movements. The
NIA can even distinguish if you are moving your eyes to the left or to the right,
but it is not like the facial muscle signal control. I tried hard to get
it working, with limited success. OCZ tends to use it to strafe left/right
in shooters. I tried it, it is horrible annoying to move your eyes fast away from
the screen in hope to move the character, just to find out that you perhaps
missed the movement while you looked away^^ I know some people are much
more successful here, for some reason this feature works for some people
better then for others.
All functions I just described here were tested
with the first and second public driver versions. Big improvements are
still possible and training plays also a big role. Is the NIA useful
for gamers? It is no mouse replacement, but if you are a pro gamer the NIA
can give you a competitive edge - if you don't mind buying it just to press
1-x buttons a little bit faster. For normal gamers it is a nice toy and
to watch how the brainwaves react on the monitor was really fascinating. Many also say that
using the NIA in games would give them a completely new game experience, but
I used it for many days in games (until it broke) and wasn't that impressed.
The NIA is so new as gaming device that I see it more as a market experiment then
as a regular product, but I never regretted to buy the one. It may not be
a really useful input device right now, but with more/better software
it could fast become a "must have".
Final words:
The NIA is the first affordable BCI which is reason enough
for all geeks to buy one. All others should be aware that
it is no mouse replacement and that learning to use it
can be frustrating. The lack of proper software like a SDK with
raw data access or mouse/joystick drivers currently prevents the
hardware from showing it's full potential, nevertheless, those who don't
expect any sci-fi wonders seem to like the NIA experience.
Relatet Links:
Michael Schuette's review at LostCircuits
Official NIA Page with Videos at OCZTechnology
How to build your own EEG (not recommended^^) at OpenEEG
Post comments corrections and suggestions here please^^
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