Paper Reading #26: Embodiment in Brain-Computer Interaction

Kenton O'Hara, Abigail Sellen, and Richard Harper are all researchers at Microsoft Research at Cambridge.

This paper was presented at CHI 2011.

Summary


Hypothesis
The hypothesis of the paper was that people react to Brain-Computer Interfaces in many different ways.

Methods
The Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) used in this research experiment is a game known as MindFlex (pictured). The "game board" has a fan underneath the construction which levitates a small ball into the air. The player controls the device via a wearable sensor on the forehead. When the player concentrates, the fan speeds up which causes the ball to rise. If the player relaxes, the fan slows down and the ball is lowered. As the game board rotates, the player must overcome obstacles by lowering or raising the ball by concentrating.

In order to test their hypothesis and to study the use of BCI interfaces in the "real world", researchers recruited 4 different groups of people. For each group, one person was in charge of getting the people for their group. The four groups were decently diverse. One group, for example, was a cohabiting couple. Another group was a family of four. These groups were all asked to play the game over the course of a week and to record themselves playing the game. The video footage was then analyzed and trends were discussed.

Results


The researchers gathered several different interesting trends.

First, they found that people attempted to concentrate by changing their body orientation. For example, one player held her breath and leaned close towards the ball. They also discovered that players developed strategies to cause the ball to lower through relaxation by looking away from the game board.

They also analyzed how people tried to visualize their concentration. For example, many of the groups who played talked about making the ball rise by thinking about making the ball rise and making the ball lower by thinking about it falling. In the game however, both of these thoughts require "concentration" so the ball would rise.

Another trend they discovered was spectator verbalizations throughout the game. Spectators played a roll in the game by either trying to make the current player mess up or by encouraging them to concentrate.

Discussion

Personally, I found this paper extremely fascinating. BCI, in my opinion, is the future of input devices. When they become more accurate and faster, the entire need for keyboards or controllers or other input devices can be completely eliminated.

This paper, while studying embodiment as it relates to BCI, gives some clues for future BCI work, in my opinion. In the thought visualization portion of the paper where participant tried to visualize lowering the ball, this can tell researchers what kind of "thought" is natural for a given action. More studies like this one can begin to map the natural "thoughts" for Brain-Computer interfaces.