Thursday 8 February 2007

Cyberpong

Following on from our discussions of the body and it's relationship to videogames, I refer you with an article from Wired nearly two years ago:

Matt Nagle is 26 years old, and is a C4 quadriplegic, and he can play Pong with his mind. You might also describe him as cybernetic, part biology, part technology.


Four months after the operation, I watched Caplan take Nagle through a typical training session. He tracked Nagle's mental activity on two large monitors, one of which displayed a graph of red and green spiking lines. Each spike represented the firing of clusters of neurons. As Nagle performed specific actions in his mind's eye - move arm left, move arm up - the electrodes picked up the patterns of nearby neuron groups. Then BrainGate amplified and recorded the corresponding electrical activity. Over dozens of trials the computer built a filter that associated specific neural patterns with certain movements. Later, when Nagle again mentally pictured the motions, the computer translated the signals to guide a cursor.

1 comment:

Gareth R. White said...

CNN has a follow-up to this piece which is sadly mostly just futurology, though I found this interesting,

Researchers unlocked the brain patterns for thoughts that represent letters of the alphabet as early as 1999.

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