Neurable's BCI - Control VR content through your mind(and my thoughts about it) — Steemit

A BCI attached to an HTC Vive     A company called Neurable has announced the Brain-Computer Interface: a way to control VR content through your mind.The BCI, is basically replacement straps for the HTC Vive that contain EEG sensors, which records electrical activity in your brain, and converts it into inputs for using user interfaces, playing games and other types of content. The company also announced that it was launching a game called Awakening at the SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. The game will be a preview for BCI, and will allow players to move objects and fight battles just through their minds. Neurable also launched a beta SDK for Unity that lets developers build UIs and games that use the BCI as input.    This is a demo of how the BCI will work. My thoughts about it 1. It seems INCREDIBLY INTUITIVE to use     When i started to read the blog post, i thought this was a inconvenient,clumsy prototype. Hell, i even thought it required inserting something into your brain.But nope, it's just a strap replacement for the HTC Vive.Even on the dev side, it's a seemingly 'normal' SDK that integrates with Unity - a very popular and (relatively)easy-to-use game engine.      When things like this are developed, the course they usually follow is that for an initial period of time, it's only used for research purposes, and then someone comes along and makes it very easy to use, and the thing explodes. It seems that Neurable has managed to make this tech very intuitive right in the first version     Now obviously, how well it works is to be seen, maybe it's just hot air and no substance, but if they are going to show a game at a conference that will exclusively use this tech as the input method (no controllers), then i think they have probably made sure that the product works reasonably well(because if it doesn't work at the conference, it's going to be a flop). Also, from the photos, it seems it's pretty big and bulky to use, so we have no idea how it will feel in extended VR sessions. 2. This could bring about a quantum leap in productivity      Imagine if this tech became so widespread, that it became the only input method to be used in all devices. A lot of people type very fast, others speak fast, some other people have very fast hand movements for controlling UIs that have become muscle-memory.  But thought is the limiting factor when it comes to getting work done     Something like the BCI could make us only as slow as our mind, removing any physical bottlenecks to productivity.I'm pretty sure the average person could get orders of magnitude more work done with this tech 3. This looks like it's great for solving accessibility issues     A lot of people who are handicapped often cannot get work done as fast as others. Unfortunately, most interface designers only think of accessibility as a minor issue.For these people, using these interfaces is an unintuitive and inconvenient experience.With BCI, those who have say, motor control disorders, or those who are speech impediments, could become as fast as any other person. 4. This could be the big thing that will make VR/AR mainstream     In one of my previous posts, i said about how VR needs new types of content, and new types of hardware to truly become marketable to the masses. Technology like the BCI is exactly what's needed to make VR mainstream      Right now, the BCI is unique to VR devices. That means, if it becomes popular in the future, people will make entirely new interfaces, entirely new types of content that will work great with the BCI. As this content will be exclusively require VR, the sales of VR will also jump because people want to create and view that content.     Let's say you make a video, where, at a particular point in the video the viewer has to make a choice between 2 options, and depending upon the choice, either the current video is played, or a different one is started. Something like this, while possible today, could become incredibly seamless, and intuitive with something like BCI.  In conclusion, i think this is a very exciting technology, that has the potential to make VR go mainstream. Sources: Neurable's blog post: https://medium.com/neurable/announcing-the-worlds-first-brain-computer-interface-for-virtual-reality-a3110db62607 Thanks for reading this post. If you liked it, please upvote and resteem this post. Follow me for more content like this :-)