Cerebral Hack

When all is said and done, our current generation has grown-up through pure connectivity and interactivity more so than any previous generation can boast.  Through our own progress with how we use a computer, the 1’s and 0’s have become as familiar as our ABC’s.  We have become more intimate with different types of interface devices allowing us to have a more of an impact in how we interact with what it is we see displayed. The mouse itself revolutionized how we use computers and computer based machines.   Even in Hollywood, we have interfaced with every muscle of the body to translate to 3D rendering software to create better stock 3D models of ourselves. What these progressions did was give us new dimensions into computing, furthering our ability to quantify life into a digital stream.  Every leap we seem to take in the relationship that our species has with the digital world, the more precise, the more detailed, the more efficient, and the more real it becomes.

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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.”

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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:
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OCZ NIA IP owners Brainfingers have announced their New training Software for the NIA and hints at their Beta SDK Release!

“We have completed a beta SDK that we will be releasing. Before we release the SDK we need to release new nia software as it will become the basis for the SDK.

www.brainfingers.com/downloadNiaSoftware.htm

The new software includes an updated Pong Game. The game can be controlled by any of the 8 brainfingers. I have also added a new dynamic following functionality to the calibration process. It is called Auto-Balance. I am hoping it will improve performance of the alpha and beta brainfinger controllers. Auto-Balance involves performing a calibration as in previous nia software, but once the calibration is performed the software then dynamically but slowly follows the calibrated balance point of each brainfinger.

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As of June 1st 2009 NeuroSky has released their BCI product commercially.  This is something that I personally have been looking forward to for quite some time.  The price is right, a lot of big names have picked up NeuroSky’s technology (names like Mattel, Star Wars, and Square Enix’s Judecca come to mind).

For $199 here is what you get

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• Neurosky’s BCI MindSet Released yesterday! $199 http://tr.im/n7YS #BCI #brain
• The Emotiv SDK including an EPOC SDK headset now available $500 http://tr.im/neYW
• RT @allblue1914 Get ready 2 take U computer interaction 2a new level W/ Emotiv’s Epoc http://emotiv.com/INDS_2/inds_2_3.html <– Great Demo
• Cerebral Hack Updates! Emotiv gets Green Light! http://tr.im/nrfb Neurosky’s MindSet Released! http://tr.im/nrfi RT
• URL Fixed! Cerebral Hack Updates! Emotiv gets Green Light! http://tr.im/nrmb Neurosky’s MindSet Released! http://tr.im/nrfi RT
• OCZ NIA IP owners Brainfingers have announced their Beta SDK and New training Software for the NIA http://tr.im/nyey Some Great Updates here
• Cerebral Hack Reviews: OCZ NIA Training Software 3.0 http://tr.im/nyWl
• RT @thinkberg BBCI Demo: Real-time control of a an “Adams Family” pinball machine via BCI. Foto coverage at http://twurl.nl/ro3wyy
• Electrocorticography Reads The Brain’s Surface http://tr.im/nG3I
• DIY Brain Hacking via….ping-pong balls? http://tr.im/nG4j
• Just added myself to the http://wefollow.com twitter directory under: #BCI #hacking #consciousness

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