Cerebral Hack

Again I cant thank enough my bud @EdRabbit and his friend @VioletBlue who are in the San Francisco area for giving me a hand at Interviewing and Demoing at Neurosky HQ Located in San Jose, CA. with me being in Chicago (and in this economy) they opted to do the foot work for me, much thanks, you two did a great job!

HOW DOES THE MINDSET WORK?

“A couple of keys for us,” Jim Sullivan, VP Worldwide Sales begins to explain “in that in some of the products we see today you can tell they took traditional medical technology and repurposed it. They cleaned it up and pulled away the pieces you don’t need. We took the opposite approach. We started with the individual – and that presented some challenges – and created the product from the ground up with them in mind. The brain is a wonderful computer, but it’s an analog computer. People in the digital age are used to digital responses. A digital response is immediate and definite, it’s either a 1 or a 0, its on or off. Analog is not that way at all. Our chip converts the signals from analog to digital”.

“Now [the Mindset] can remove the measurement of muscle movement, it’s listening to brainwaves, the faintest signal in the human body. Your heartbeat can be picked up very easily, it’s a very strong electrical signal. Brainwaves are measured in microvolt’s. Anytime you’re listening to brainwaves, because they are so faint, you have to listen really, really hard. So for us it was a challenge to get rid of the muscle noise and just focus on brainwaves. When you look at something like the NIA that uses muscles for control, most of that noise you see in the brainwave, we worked hard to filter out. So it’s simply a different approach. We take that [muscle noise] out of the equation”

“The two algorithms we ship in this chip are Attention and Mediation, that’s what we call them. You can call them any number of things. Attention; by the way in Neuroscience, has 42 very different definitions, and meditation also has a very large amount. Attention in our case is really a single minded focus, blocking everything but one thing out in your mind. So you can drive the attention meter on our Brainwave Visualizer application  very high by staring at something and concentrating on moving the dial. Meditation is not the opposite of attention, it’s like a venn diagram; you can be very attentive, and very serene at the same time. The MindSet does also provide the raw EEG wave – but that is primarily used more by researchers than developers at the moment.”

THE HISTORY OF NEUROSKY

“The company was founded in 2004,” Communications Manager Tansy Brook said “and our CEO came on board in 2005 and restructured the company. The company was started by one of our founders, who were actually interested in making a toy for his daughter. He had bought her a remote control car, and she got upset with her brother because he kept taking away the remote control. So she went to her dad and said ‘I wish I could just control it with my mind.’ And fortunately for her, her father was actually a scientist. So he; as a pet project, started experimenting with the technology and then pulled on some additional experts. But in 2005 we restructured from being a ‘Let’s make this cool remote control car’ to saying ‘Ok we have this technology which is called BCI(Brain-to-Computer Interface), that has a lot more positional, and so rather than specializing in just doing toy development- because there are other groups who are experts in toys, like some of our partners, Mattel and Uncle Milton’ – we realized that where the benefits really are is focusing on developing a technology that is cost effective, and  user friendly and then allowing different industries to apply it. It works out really well for us, because it means that we partner with experts within different industries, we explain the technology to them and then they come up with different ideas of how to apply it.”

“We are a technology provider.” Jim chimed in. “So we don’t generally build the apps ourselves because the one thing we are smart enough to know,  is that we know nothing about those businesses, compared to what they know”

“Our solution really is a tiny chip the size of my pinky nail. The MindSet for us is a developer and research tool, but it’s also a product that a consumer can buy.”

THE BENEFITS OF BEING A TECHNOLOGY PROVIDER

“As a technology provider you may never need to do a direct consumer outreach. We can hand off everything but our piece to them. We work with them to develop their own headsets, like with the Mattel headset, the UMI headset. They would send us prototypes and we’d test them. But that’s as deep as we had to weigh in on it. They have very competent creative teams and engineering teams, and they are really fun to work with. Having companies approach us has been great because it allows us to focus more on the technology rather than consumer adoption. So far most of the products people have heard about are for toys and games, because they have the shortest development cycle. But we have partners in a number of other industries that have not been announced yet. The good thing about starting with toys is that it really helped us to perfect the cost effectiveness.

STAR WARS FORCE TRAINER

“The Uncle Milton headset was designed by people who designed hardware for Star Wars.” Tansy adds “They had people who literally did designs for Star Wars do the design for the headsets.”

“Not only that,” adds Jim Sullivan “when their toy becomes available the guiding voice in the Force Trainer is Yoda, he talks you through the whole thing. At first they just started taking some pre-recorded clips, but then they said “Why don’t we use the Yoda guy” so they went a hired the voice of Yoda. So now Yoda really does walk you through the 15 levels of the game. So you’ve got things Yoda never said in the movie making it  pretty unique. If you’re a major Star Wars fan, there is a whole lot of Yoda stuff you can’t hear except on this toy which it makes it a collectible.

FUTURE APPLICATIONS AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

“A year ago our SDK was $9000, it was that way for a lot of reasons, most of it was for what it took for a small company to support a big company doing hardware development. Today you can buy the Mindset for $200 and download the SDK for free, so we are really trying to open up the platform, and to get it out to as many people as possible. And we have had TONS of downloads. The other thing we have tried to do is put together a web store for developers large or small who develop apps to run with the Mindset ” Applications that are coming soon include a game from First Hill Media called Hero 108, which will also have a show on the Cartoon Network, and MindDoll a game we showed at GDC this year. MindDoll was produced by Playlab, one of our serious games partners. The other game we showed the proof of concept for at GDC, is Square Enix’s Judecca.

“We recently released the MindSet Development Tools, SDK, for free because we wanted to open the technology up to small and large developers. Currently we are working on setting up a new department called NeruoSky University. We already work with a number of universities, but we would really like to expand and learn more about the capabilities of our technology. I get questions from teachers and emails from logs of people asking about applications that help children with ADD, Alzhimers and a number of other conditions. Universities have some of the greatest expertise in these areas and so we have created the NSU program to help support their research. We understand that our technology is not a replacement for traditional, medical grade equipment. We see our technology as a complement to treatments, particularly as a way to extend care and research to the home environment. Right now we are expanding the information on our website that gives researchers a better idea of what they can expect from our technology to determine if it a solution for them. “

THOUGHTS ON CONSUMER ADAPTATION TO BCI

“You have to keep in mind it’s a new market it’s so funny because there’s almost this thing where like they won’t believe it until they try it [and then after they do] they are absolutely ecstatic. But you’re still introducing a new technology that most people have never seen, never dealt with. But it’s their first use of it and you’re trying to encourage them to adopt something new. Making it user friendly is more likely for people not be discouraged by using it. For example the Apple IPod, there were tons of music players that came out before the IPod, but one of the reasons it was so popular is that it was so easy to use, it was so user friendly, it was different, but it was intuitive. So they really trained the market. Now you have the IPhone being so well received because it’s so intuitive to do all these different things, but it’s because people have already learned how to use it. That’s where we aim to be.“ said Tansy Brook