Emotiv EEG

I look forward to seeing what comes out of this idea. Please post your results! Neural interfaces could be a killer app for the Rift. Its already on your head after all.

I have a couple of Emotiv EPOC's. These 14 channel wireless EEG headsets are great. I plan to work on combining the Oculus and Emotiv together as soon as my Oculus DK arrives this week. I think it should be relatively simple. I have previously incorporated the Emotiv raw EEG data into one of my NVIDIA Tesla GPU programs and did FFT on the Tesla. The only thing difficult was that I had a 64-bit app and the Emotiv libraries are 32-bit only. I spent several weeks writing a COM server to let the 64-bit app call the 32-bit Emotiv libraries. I have installed the Oculus SDK and I see that it has both 32-bit and 64-bit libraries. I will stick to 32-bit for now so that I can incorporate the Emotiv.

After building the Oculus "Minimal" console app, I do not see any difficulties with including the Emotiv libraries.

Since the Emotiv is designed to be used as a control device, it should work well in VR.

Do you know anything about the split they've made between the headsets that use their libraries, and the ones that allow display of raw EEG values?

Long ago they seemed to be the same device but different software, but for some reason they've got two independent sets of hardware now.

The raw EEG data is obviously going to be more flexible, but the downside is if you want any of the functionality their standard libraries provide (eg, actions, facial expressions, etc), you'd have to re-implement it yourself.

I'm not sure how easy that is, considering the kind of research it depends on... XD

I have a researcher and a developer unit. To tell the truth, all of my work to this point has been with the developer unit and all of that work has been with raw EEG data. It is my understanding though that the developer and research units allow raw EEG access as well as the "state" recognition. But, I have not tried the facial expression and cognitive state recognition.

In terms of interfacing with the Oculus Rift, personally I think the raw EEG would not be the way to go for any type of VR or game control. I would only recommend the raw EEG route for research types of projects. Given that, I believe the consumer version of the Emotiv EPOC would work fine for VR and gaming.

I had a lot of hope and interesting ideas with Emotiv Epoc's, especially in regards to using them as involunatry input methods for things like reading a players emotional state into the game and having the game react to the players real emotions. However the Epoc's are priced rather high, and there is a total BULLSHIT license agreement where unless you have some deep wallets, you have to sell any application that uses their devices SDK through their crappy little app store, and only their crappy little app store.

So in exchange for developing for an expensive fringe peripheral, you have to surrender control of your applications distribution. Good luck with that Emotive.

Yeah... That licensing got me as well.

Seems like a really good way to ensure your device never gets any kind of popularity.

As to the headsets themselves, I recall ages ago there was a split between developer and consumer headsets...

But their current info suggests you can develop with the consumer level headsets, but there's now a 'research' headset as well.

The point being that the provided information implies the 'research' headset can read raw EEG data, but the cheaper one cannot. Which is fine, but it also seems to imply that the research headset cannot function alongside their built-in library functions...

I remember this because I recall their website from several years back having different hardware for sale than what they've got now...

But ultimately, it's their bizarre licensing terms that really makes me wary of dealing with them.

Meanwhile, you can get their SDK for free with emulated headset functions - but even that had some nasty terms and conditions attached to it when I last looked into it. - But assuming those are tolerable, you can at least experiment with what kind of input an Epoc can give you by using the SDK and an emulated headset.

I would guess it won't give you much insight into how reliable their detection algorithms are, but it seems a reasonable way to get a sense for what they claim the device can do...