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April 21, Thursday
12:00 – 14:00

In 1965 Ivan Sutherland introduced the idea of the “Ultimate Display”. The ripples of effect from his original concept and realization are still working themselves out today. In this research we explore one possible paradigm of the Ultimate Interface: one where people don’t actually have to do anything physical in order to interact with and through a computer, but where the computer is directly attuned to their thoughts.

A particularly exciting realm in which to investigate the possibilities inherent in this idea is within immersive virtual environments (IVE). Imagine a situation where a participant only needs to think about an action in order to make it happen - to move, to select an object, to shift gaze, to control the movements of their (virtual) body, or to design the environment itself, by thought alone. What would that be like?

We have connected the Graz brain-computer-interface (BCI) with a highly immersive, Cave-like virtual reality (VR) system. Participants were able to rotate in a virtual bar room and move along a single axis along a virtual street, by only imagining hand and feet movement. Our results indicate that subjects performed in the VR better than with traditional BCI. We are now conducting an additional set of experiments to further understand the advantages of VR to BCI, and to further evaluate the participants’ subjective experience.

We have connected the Graz brain-computer-interface (BCI) with a highly immersive, Cave-like virtual reality (VR) system. Participants were able to rotate in a virtual bar room and move along a single axis along a virtual street, by only imagining hand and feet movement. Our results indicate that subjects performed in the VR better than with traditional BCI. We are now conducting an additional set of experiments to further understand the advantages of VR to BCI, and to further evaluate the participants’ subjective experience.

Bio:

Doron Friedman is a post-doc Research Fellow in the VECG lab in the University College of London, working on the physiological and neuroscientific basis of the sense of presence in virtual reality. His interest is in intelligent media systems. He received his PhD from Tel Aviv University with a thesis on knowledge-based formalization of cinematic expression. His inventions were also deployed in the industry: he was the co-founder of Earthnoise, Inc., a startup company that provided a solution for semi-automated video editing and delivery over the Internet and mobile networks, and the inventor of Falcon2000, a successful AI tool for solving the year2000 problem in Assembly language legacy software.