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From: lmiller@aerospace.aero.org (Lawrence H. Miller)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: Neural Interfacing and VR
Message-ID: <10713@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 5 Nov 90 20:49:07 GMT
References: <9963@milton.u.washington.edu>
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In article <9963@milton.u.washington.edu> keithley@applelink.apple.com (Craig Ke
ithley) writes:
>
>
>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.  

        The person in charge was Dr. Jacques Vidal.  His lab
        was called the brain-computer interface lab.  Here is a
        relevant publication (refer format):

%A Jacques J. Vidal
%T Real-Time Detection of Brain Events in EEG
%J Proceedings of the IEEE
%V 65
%N 5
%D May, 1977
%P 633-641

        It is important to emphasize that this work did not
        detect "thoughts" at all, and was never claiming that
        it did.  Rather it detected "event-related potentials",
        the events being a stimulus--a light flashing, and
        based on which direction you were LOOKING (not thinking
        about looking, but actually looking), the project
        performed pattern recognition techniques to determine
        the gaze direction from the evoked EEG signal.

Larry Miller
Aerospace Corporation
lmiller@aerospace.aero.org
213-336-5597