Have you ever wondered what the world of people with disabilities is like? How would you text your friends if you lost your arms in a car accident? What would Stephen Hawking wish for if he came back alive and couldn’t find his omnipotent wheelchair? Our project Traveling Mind is motivated by the needs of people with disabilities to interact with the world. We want to explore ways to extract control directives from brain activity signals. Our prototype would be an iOS mobile game to demonstrate how users can effectively mind control computer agents.
While users are playing the game, the control signals will be collected through the EEG caps they are wearing. The extracted directives will be represented as a 1D float between -1 and 1, with positive values indicating the extent to the right and negative values indicating the extent to the left. Values close to zero mean stop. The assumption is that the users are fully focused on the game without any external distractions.
At the beginning of the game, the users will be given about 30 seconds to figure out how to move the cart around (either left or right) and get used to controlling with mind. After that, obstacles will be falling from the top of the screen and the user needs to drive the cart to dodge the obstacles. As the user gets better at controlling the cart, the obstacles will appear at a faster rate. For the first two times the cart being hit, the obstacles will slow down to allow users to re-adjust their controlling strategy. The game is over upon the third time.
