Thanks to a friend at CES looks like Mattel has found good fortune using NeuroSkyS Think Gear Technology. We were sent pictures from CES 2011 of what looks to be the ultimate battle of the minds: Mind Flex DUAL!

We have a video too but are waiting for the upload. No further information has been given yet, will update more as I find out :)

So it looks like after many months the Beta SDK for the (once OCZ now) BCInet NIA (Neural Impulse Actuator) has finally been released. When going to the site http://cortex.in/hr3oPx you will see the following message: Thank you for your interest in the Windows SDK. Due to popular response, our open beta test has reached capacity. If you are still interested in participating, please mail us at sdk@bcinet.com with your name, company, title, phone number and SDK interest, and we’ll contact you directly. 

For those already participating in the beta test, you will be kept informed of updates via e-mail. –The BCInet Team In essence what this means is that a bunch of knuckleheads have been using fake email addresses to apply for the Beta SDK. All you have to do is use your real email address and the rest of the noted information necessary and you will be emailed the location where to download it from. Happy Hacking!

On 9.13.2010 Emotiv forums lit up with the news of its EPOC device being hacked, promptly the post made by Cody Brocious (Daeken) was taken down and removed.  The next day, a post was createdto merely discuss the existence of the hack, some cheered, some sneered, even one of the admins (Read: Research Manager and CTO) jumped in on the discussion.  And from reading there really is a divide in the comprehension of what hacking this device means. What the hack allows is raw EEG data available from the ($300) consumer EPOC unit, which is only a perk of the ($750) Research EPOC unit in which I am sure you are bound by some sort of NDA.  

The admin that posted made it seem like because of this, Emotiv may have to close their doors and go out of business due to “skittish investors” and that the Research Unit is a “substantial part of our revenue” However, as a poster even points out: “on what planet is a bare bones driver written in python the equivalent of a research SDK?”  And to further that, most people buying a research unit are doing so for profit, and you can’t very well make a profit off someone else’s technology using their equipment without being sanctioned to do so…the research unit gives you that ability.  And the other far-fetched idea that some other company will come along and….steal open data…..?  

I don’t know who’s got who drinking the kool-aid over at Emotiv, but there seems to be an ample supply to go around. 

Personally if your investors pulled the rug out from under you that quick, you were already working on borrowed time for one reason or another, your next scape goat could be sneezing in the wrong direction.  He goes on to talk about “It’s all well and good to demonstrate how smart you are by hacking the iPhone – Apple can afford to lose some revenue”.  I’d really like to know how and why this guy thinks that the iPhone getting hacked cost Apple money.  Maybe someone should not only point out to him that it increased its sales….but that Androids entire business model and popularity is based on the fact that there are so many Android hackers customizing devices to the way CONSUMERS want.  It’s no wonder their investors are skittish….they have people like this they are throwing money at. I decided to have a small chat with Cody to get a little insight as to what he thought of the whole situation. This is what he had to say….

How have things been going since its news came out?

Things have been going quite well. We’ve received a great deal of support from the community, and at this point we have support for nearly everything the EPOC has. Linux support is now solid, and we can read the raw EEG data with the same precision as the official SDK.

I’ve seen the community take the discovery with open arms, but I’ve heard Emotiv themselves haven’t been to happy, what actions have they taken, if any at all regarding it?

I heard they are looking to patch the hole and stop selling devices till it’s fixed. Emotiv has been posting various things on their forum in response to Emokit, but they haven’t contacted me, or — to my knowledge — Github (which hosts the source). It looks like they’re going to attempt to battle this on a purely technical level. You mentioned earlier that you had just recently got into EEG and BCI devices.

What was it that first caught your eye? And what about it intrigued you?

I really got into this because it’s the intersection of device hacking, which I’ve done for ages, and brain hacking, which I’m very new to. The EPOC is the highest quality EEG device for its price, as far as I’m aware, and presented an opportunity for me to mix two of my passions. I’m really looking forward to what people do with it now that Emokit is getting to be close to production ready.

Have you taken a look at the other two commercially available BCI devices (Mindset and OCZs NIA) or have any thoughts on them?

I’ve looked quickly at them, but haven’t gotten my hands on either.  The reason I chose to go after the EPOC was the large sensor count, which is really quite impressive for the price.

Yea, it is actually. My relationship with the NIA and Mindset people have been overly “open arms”, they are some great people working in those two places, my inquiry’s to Emotiv have always been less “friendly” or open, and robotic responses, and from the reaction Ive seen from one of their techs about the whole situation. Do you think this sort of relationship that Emotiv puts out will change in the future in general towards their users?

I think it has to. If they don’t change the way they’re doing things, there’s no chance they’re going to survive. Right now they’re attacking the people driving development for their product (being called a ‘pirate’ repeatedly on the Emotiv forum spawned me to write “The Hardware Hacker Manifesto” a couple days ago, in fact) rather than embracing it and using the open development community to drive sales of their product to consumers. They seem to think that because they have tech, they’re going to sell units, where it’s really a large library of software that will sell units. They’ll either figure that out or someone else will.

In closing, we are living in a technological age, one in which no one person can see what the future holds.  One thing can be certain; it is and will be the people who control it.  When it comes to the subject of the mind, you will not have a shortage of the same curiosity that gave birth to the first computer hacker, in fact, there will be an exponential amount as the opportunities present themselves, because I believe our mind is the most powerful and complex element in the entire universe, to some, that’s a scary thought, but to me personally, it gives me hope knowing curiosity and innovation without restrictions is what will drive out future, and not fear.

It looks as if Dr. Michael Schuette has morphed OCZs’ NIA (Neural Impulse Actuator) into a spin off venture called BCInet.  From what I gathered from previous talks is that BCI and OCZ were at a “We are from Mars, and you are from Venus” type of relationship, OCZ has let the spin take place with there blessing, and with royalties I would imagine. What does this mean for the NIA? Well, it means less restrictions, faster turnover, and a new and imporved device and an overhaul of its software that is used to power the NIA. Dr. Schuette has let us at CerebralHack know that out test driveing unit is on its way, and when it does, Ill be giving  a side by side comparison of the two devices. Stay tuned! Share and Enjoy

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

Firstly I want to thank my bud @EdRabbit and his friend @VioletBlue who are in the San Francisco area for giving me a hand at Interviewing and Demoing at OCZ 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 stellar job!  I hope you two had a lot of fun :)

For more information on the OCZ NIA you can read ther review we did for the device HERE. For some custom mods that have been done by its development community and can find the links to various Applications HERE. 

And you can join in the discutions within its community HERE Listening to the audio interview, and then myself having a talk with Dr. Michael Schuette on the phone, Ive come to gain a lot of respect for OCZ and where they have gone with the NIA, their philosophies on BCI and business within its market in general. 

For those that don’t know, OCZ is a manufacturer of High Performance RAM for anything from “1337 gaming rigs” to professional engineering machines that run ProE and SolidWorks at the same time.  A lot of people down talk it because it doesn’t do what they expect it to.  When in fact it does more than what they let on, and have plans in the future to do even more.  Dr. Schuette even says: “Even with the current device we have, its technology is years ahead of our competitors in terms of its capabilities.

The underlying principal is that it’s nothing but biofeedback.  You see that you’re doing something that you want to do and your body starts to give you a positive feedback. 

If you’re trying really hard to do it, it won’t work.  If you’re off your target or its doing something you don’t want it to do, your body will give off a negative feedback. And that’s one of the biggest problems we’ve been having trying to get this device to market is because everybody says “We need a tutorial we need a manual to show us how to get this to work!”  Do I know what I’m doing? Hell no, but I know it’s working, you know it’s working, you see it working. Just sit back and relax and sit back and watch yourself.  We’ve been sorta shooting ourselves in the foot saying with calling one of our capabilities ”Muscle Control” and we’ve got all our competitors saying well “…we are using Brain Waves” and  “We are using Brain responses.” 

And seriously if you look at what [our competitors] are doing, they are using “Smile”…..do you know what “Smile” is?  That’s a muscle response.   Everyone’s using muscles.” He goes on to say “The NIA has the capabilities to read the other brain waves [Alpha, beta, delta, gamma, and theta].  Before we went into mass production we actually scaled back from 42 frequencies to 8 due to pure processing issues by most high end gaming machines standards (And OCZ knows Gaming machine Standards).  We had to cut those back just to keep the readings in real time, and real time was something that was very important to us. “

When we asked Michael about different projects and what was going on in the BCI world he had this to say. “Things like Law Enforcement in reference to ‘Prior Knowledge Detection’; which is light years ahead in power and effectiveness than a  polygraph, market research, automotive, controls of different apparatuses.  Picking up abnormal brain patterns, preventing accidents, be it drug abuse, drunk, or simply being too tired where it would put the drivers or other drivers at risk by means of not being attentive.  All BCI devices are going to get a huge boost soon.   And Im kind of hoping with the Uncle Bradley & Mattel Approach (referencing NeuroSkys partners), that it sets the pace for marketing for BCI in general. The problem is some [Businesses] have wasting a lot of invested money.  One is from a big name company for $20mil for what they call finding a way to gauge people’s emotional states during conference calls or let’s say negotiations.

They even at some point claimed they mapped over 60,000 emotions.  And do you know what happened?  Nothing.  It doesn’t work like that. I can tell you it doesn’t work like that because that certain commonality between different people is on a very crude level.  It doesn’t work because everybody’s brain works in a different way.   Ask 10 different people to watch a video clip and have them explain it to you, and you have 10 different versions of that video clip. We are however involved with a lot of different projects right now.  We have budget constraints and personnel constraints and that’s why unfortunately we are way way behind schedule on our projects. But I still hope to pull them off one way or any other. We are working with ane outfit; I can’t really talk about who it is, but what they are doing falls in the category of prior knowledge testing that I mentioned before; truth testing.  The way how this works is really simple.  You give someone a specific stimulus, or let them think of the stimulus, something that produces a negative reaction.  And then give them something that invokes a negative reaction and you use those two to create a “Signature”.  We would take what you would see on the NIA software configuration, expand that and add a few more frequencies.  And the ratio between the Negative and Positive would produce that specific persons Signature.   Now after you’ve established that signature you can present that person with a random slide show. 

And the interesting thing about that there is a period which is called the “P300 period” or the “P300 Time” which is the 300 milliseconds before a conscience choice is made. We can then gauge the frequencies within that P300 Period up against that persons Signature.  The technology can be used in, not so much gaining proof of having done something wrong.  But if you have the possibility of presenting somebody the details of a crime scene and unequivocally establishing whether that person had any knowledge of that, you can then throw out 90% of false suspects.  People can’t lie about not knowing about something.  There’s no conscious control.  It’s a substantial improvement to a very beatable Polly graph test if you know how to beat one.  You can’t beat your own conscience.  You can’t influence the ratio between all the different brain waves.  Especially if you don’t know what your specific signature is.  It’s pretty powerful. I’ve made good progress with Futuremark who is coming out with a game in October.  And they are interested in potentially putting in something where you could use the NIA for bonus levels where you can use the brain fingers to accomplish tasks Sadly the economy is not where we want it to be.  And the NIA isn’t the only project a company like OCZ has on their table.  If it was up to me, yea I’d do them all and would already be released.” When I asked about the much anticipated SDK this is what Dr. Schulltte had to say: The problem with the SDK is that the very economical hardware we used is based on a very secret algorithm, which is the Source Code that Andrew at BrainFingers owns.  This is Andrews nest egg that he uses as his source of income. 

We are still trying to work a way around the SDK where that part of the source code stays proprietary, but allows enthusiasts to develop. Unfortunately everybody’s mindset and expectations are somewhat different and that has created some frictions.  Thankfully the pull down menu in the original software has so many possibilities within the existing software where the community has been able to make due with what we are able to legally provide. Wrapping things up, I asked about what he sees the future of BCI being, the markets that will be targeted, and how it will affect our daily lives: “One thing I’m particularly concerned about is the geriatric market.  There are a lot of elderly people out there who were born before the computer age for example my mom who is 85 yrs old now and she got her first PC when she was 75, and she’s managed to do things like email and word processing. 

One time I showed her the Pong Game, now she’s never played a computer game in her life, and when attempting to use the NIA she was blown away by it, and is now the superstar of her group of friends who now also play it with her.  She was able to use it so well because brain functions are so intuitive, you don’t need prior knowledge of computers as much as you would when playing say a FPS game.”

“First time we are pealing back the layers of distraction that the human brain has built over the last 10,000 – 50,000 years from thought, to language to written thought to machines then a writing language to speak to electronics to make them perform actions that we command them to do. 

Now we are pealing those layers back off and we are now getting a chance at a direct interface between brain and machine interpreting thought, its quite amazing and interesting thing to experience and watch evolve. 6min demo Michael did for @EdRabbit and @VioletBlue I

d like to thank Dr Schuette and OCZ for having us and being so open about such an interesting topic.  I wish them all the luck in the world and to keep continuing to push the boundries and to keep on developing for the future.