Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ogicse!milton!keithley@applelink.apple.com
From: keithley@applelink.apple.com (Craig Keithley)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Neural Interfacing and VR
Message-ID: <9963@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 25 Oct 90 03:54:46 GMT
Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: Apple Computer Inc., Campbell II CA
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Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu



Neural Interfacing (and its application to VR) might be here sooner than 
you think.

Some 15 years ago a UCLA research project successfully used VERY low end 
minicomputers to detect specific thoughts.  The basic idea was/is that it 
possible to pattern match a properly filtered set of brain waves to a 
previously captured sample.  When youUve got a good match, you can respond 
to the command in a manner similar to voice recognition.  

I recommend that you go to your local university library, and borrow the 
thesis entitled:
    Computer System Architecture for a Brain Computer Interface
    Ronald Olch
    1975(?)

RonaldUs master thesis was pretty dry reading about the actual physical 
layout of the lab and and the kinds of  minicomputers, punch tape readers, 
plotters, cabling, etc, etc.  There was a notable absense of specific 
algorhythms and sample code.  I did chuckle a bit when I read a paragraph 
describing what the coming powerful (in 1975?) microprocessors would do to 
improve this process of recognizing thoughts.  Its 1990, can you say DSP?

Having read this, I managed to track Mr. Olch down and interogated :-) him 
about the actual mechanics of recognizing specific thoughts.   Very 
Interesting stuff.  Its not as hard as you might think (pun intented!).  
Mr. Olch is no longer involved with this research... But he did tell me 
that the Principal Researcher was a Jaques (sp?) Vidal.   While Jaques 
hasnUt published under his name, he has been a co-authored a variety of 
papers which have a lot to do with where VR/Neural Interfacing is going.

If anyone has any more thoughts and/or questions, send them to me 
directly... ItUll keep the neural noise on sci.virtual-worlds to a 
reasonable db.



Craig Keithley, Apple Computer
keithley@applelink.apple.com 
keithley@apple.com
ITS NOT MY FAULT! [standard disclaimer]