[Noisebridge-discuss] openeeg

[Jonathan Foote]

Judging by some of this traffic, I think people have misconsceptions
regarding EEGs and would do well to read up on it a bit. EEGs are not
a "brain jack." You are not going to control anything reliably, and
even detecting anything is hard. (Yes, you've seen the monkey move the
robot arm video. That's not EEG: that measured specific neural regions
using electrodes inserted through a hole in the skull.)

At best, you can measure the energy in the various bands (alpha, beta,
etc.) with pro EEG gear and (lots of) good electrodes. How and whether
this correlates with particular mental activities or emotions is still
an open research question. With practice, you can likely change your
alpha/beta ratio but it's going to take the better part of a minute if
you can do it at all.  And noise and muscle movements (e.g. blinking)
will give you 10x the signal of anything going on in the brain.

I don't mean to say that this isn't an excellent thing to be
interested in or to hack on, just that it's much easier to get your
expectations up than it is to get anything actually working -- see
Emotiv as an example of hype vs. reality.

Art projects using the EEG like Kal's robot or the Monochrom drink
machine are cool and fun, but they basically use EEG as a glorified
random noise source. It would be excellent to do something better.


On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 1:16 PM, Vlad Spears <spears at 2secondfuse.com> wrote:
>> Al Billings wrote:
>>>
>>> Jake has mentioned some interest in hacking openeeg. This has been
>>> discussed here before.
>>>
>>> Other than him and I, who else is interested in this kind of project?
>
>
> I'd definitely like to work on an OpenEEG project.  I've considered building
> my own several times in the past, but thought I would give Emotiv a bit more
> time to reach the market.  My end goal would be to use the stream of data to
> guide musical machinery in Max/MSP, Pd and bridged DAW environments using
> OSC or MIDI.
>
> I bet I can make my brain sound like drum 'n' bass.
>
> Vlad
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