Abstract
We present a brain-computer interface (BCI) version of the famous “Connect Four”. Target selection is based on brain event-related responses measured with nine EEG sensors. Two players compete against each other using their brain activity only. Importantly, we turned the general difficulty of producing a reliable BCI command into an advantage, by extending the game play and rules, in a way that adds fun to the game and might well prove to trigger up motivation in future studies. The principle of this new BCI is directly inspired from our own implementation of the classical P300 Speller (Maby et al. 2010, Perrin et al. 2011). We here establish a proof of principle that the same electrophysiological markers can be used to design an efficient two-player game. Experimental evaluation on two competing healthy subjects yielded an average accuracy of 82%, which is in line with our previous results on many participants and demonstrates that the BCI “Connect Four” can effectively be controlled. Interestingly, the duration of the game is not significantly affected by the usual slowness of BCI commands. This suggests that this kind of BCI games could be of interest to healthy players as well as to disabled people who cannot play with classical games.
Highlights
Driven by the needs of people with physical disabilities, researchers have begun to work on direct brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), in the aim of enabling them to communicate and move without resorting to the usual peripheral nervous and muscular pathways
BCIs were originally developed in the context of clinical research
We developed a P300-based BCI for gaming
Summary
Driven by the needs of people with physical disabilities, researchers have begun to work on direct brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), in the aim of enabling them to communicate and move without resorting to the usual peripheral nervous and muscular pathways. The most practical and widely applicable BCI solutions are based on noninvasive electrophysiological recordings, namely, electroencephalography (EEG) As command signals, those BCI use event-related potentials (ERPs) like the P300 [2] or self-regulatory activities such as changes in cortical rhythms [3, 4]. A reliable command can only be achieved by accumulating data over long time windows, at the expense of the primary interest of the game Another drawback is the obvious one of having to put an EEG cap on, the field has made tremendous progress in that respect in the last few years [18]. We briefly report the online proof of concept of a new BCI game, based on the old and well-known “Connect Four”.
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