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Opportunity Notes

By Rafe Needleman

Mind Games

Invention |

LeWeb conference chair Loic Le Meur wears a Muse headband while writing an email.

Usually in Opportunity Notes I try to identify the opportunity that a new product or technology stands for. Today I’ve got a new technology, but I’m not sure what the opportunity is. It’s worth exploring, though.

The company is Interaxon and the product is Muse. It’s a brainwave-reading headband that CEO Ariel Garten demonstrated for the first time publicly at Le Web in Paris this week. In her demo, conference chair Loic Le Meur, wearing the headband that fits like a pair of glasses but over the forehead, typed an email to his wife, and as he did so, the font that showed up on-screen varied with his emotional state: Flowery script when he was writing loving words, a more aggressive bold san serif when he talked about how how her work “rocked.”

The Muse headband reads EEGs. With current technology, it’s enough to determine rough mental activity level and to some extent mood, but the four-sensor headband is nowhere close to reading thoughts or even intention. While you could, arguably, train your brain to move to a certain state to control an activity, the technology isn’t meant to replace a keyboard, mouse, or even a button (there is at least one toy based on EEG control, though).

The email in question.

So the question is, what can you do with a headband that measures mental activity, or focus, or mood? Garten discussed professional applications, such as athletics. The headband could be used to reinforce players getting into “the zone.” I suppose one could also use it for creative professions. Maybe an IDE could lock out a programmer if it detected he was not focusing and was likely to write bad code.

Maybe, as Garten says, the applications are games. Again, not for control, but for mood. Perhaps your avatar in a online world could vary depending on your state of mind. Or non-player characters would be aggressive or compliant, depending.

The Muse could be used to generate yet another stream of data to correlate with other personal instrumentation products that read physical activity level, heart rate, location, sleep state, and so on. If we’re going to end up covered in sensors like an astronaut, might as well record brain activity too, right?

Or perhaps if I were wearing it right now it could help me focus so I could figure out what other cool things could be done with it. Assuming people can be convinced to wear it, there must be some creative applications.

The $199 Muse comes with an SDK for developers interested in exploring the EEG data stream.

-Rafe


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  • Steven Carey

    certainly NOT Google Glasses http://youtu.be/9c6W4CCU9M4

    2 things immediately come front of mind: First– early in my design career I learned you shouldn’t incorporate more than 3 fonts at a time in visual communication. Second–if hand writing / mind writing experts will eventually serve precog role from sifting through peoples
    schizophrenic “looking” EEG generated communication. I think Philip K. Dick would have tried these while tripping, but would ultimately return to Laozi for inspiration.

  • Robert Oschler

    There are a few things to keep in mind regarding EEG consumer headbands.

    First of all is how much EEG is actually being detected. The premium level of EEG detection belongs to intra-cranial devices based on research like the ECOG (Electrocorticography) technique pioneered by Dr. Gerwin Schalk at The Wadsworth Center. This technique uses a thin sheet of sensors that literally lay atop of the surface of the brain requiring a surgical procedure. Even then you can not detect the firing of individual neurons. However you do get a significant level of detail/resolution in detecting the joint firing of bunches of neurons.

    Since surgery is not an attractive marketing pitch (yet), consumer devices have to do their detection from outside the thick wall of the skull. As Dr. Schalk told me in so many words (paraphrasing here), ECOG is like being inside a football stadium and being able to see the fans do patterns of movement like the wave. You can’t hear what individual fans are saying, but you do have a reasonable idea of what’s happening throughout the stadium. Consumer EEG devices since they are non-invasive are like being outside in the parking lot. If you concentrate real hard and no one talks too loud or blows their horn, you can get a rough idea of where large groups of fans are cheering all at the same time.

    http://www.wadsworth.org/resnres/bios/schalk.htm

    However, one eye-blink, one slight flicker of a facial muscle, and the faint electrical activity of the EEG signal is overwhelmed by the much larger electrical charge of a muscle. In many cases people are actually using an EEG headset as an EMG device (Electromyography) and are detecting muscle movement instead, not true EEG data. So when you are relaxing to make the ball float you are really calming your head and face muscles, not guiding anything with your EEG signals.

    The only time you can really detect EEG signals is when the user is relatively still and not contracting the muscles of their face and head, a very difficult thing for most people to do for an extended period of time. That’s why headsets such as the Emotiv 14-channel headset, which has sensors that wrap around your skull and forehead are so versatile. They can also detect micro-facial gestures and gross facial expressions. The latter is very useful for developing software that can detect when people smile, or frown, grimace, etc. That alone would be a huge boon to software programs that manage information because the user’s emotional state could be added to any data recorded including reactions to songs, letters, pictures, experiencing frustration while operating certain parts of a program (something that with a camera recording the user’s face is a treasure chest for UI designers, web site or app), and much more:

    http://emotiv.com/

    True EEG detection is a much harder nut to crack but that too offers a wealth of new vistas for future software that reacts to the user’s general emotional state or mood, if you can teach them to keep their head and face still. Look into Rosalind Picard’s work on Affective Computing for a good starting point for possible software interface ideas for EEG headsets. Note, most of her initial work had to do with a GSR (Galvanic Skin Reponse) device she helped develop. Now she has added camera based facial detection to her offerings too.

    http://web.media.mit.edu/~picard/index.php

    It is conceivable that in the near future the average person will wear a headset when at home and the home will automatically change the music, ambient lighting, temperature, humidity, incoming accepted and rejected phone callers, and much more in response to their mood. Combine that with a gesture and object detection system like the Kinect or Leap, and homes in the next 10 years will make the homes of today look outright, well, stupid.

    – roschler

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