Recently I’ve been spending some time experimenting with Brain Control Interfaces (BCIs). I wanted to develop a very simple, accessible game to make use of the Emotiv EEG headsets that the lab recently purchased. These are great off the shelf, if not medical grade, fairly quick to set up and pretty cheap EEG sensors and come with a fairly decent SDK. Tug-o-matic relies on the vicarious architecture, meaning its feasible to actually control it with any two dimensional sensor input, but it was intended to be used with cognitive EEG. The principle is that you train it what “pulling” feels like (i.e. think about pulling) and then to play the game you must simply replicate that thought pattern.
It’s pretty fun, not too easy and good as a two player game (though that does necessitate two players). There’s nothing especially new here, other than the input reusability, but I’m still fairly proud of it. The name is not too good though. It smacks disturbingly of teledildonics…
Dr Paul Tennent 