Jimsolos Dive-Tech Development Thread

[JimSolo]

[Sterben]

Good to here look forward to more updates in the comings days/ weeks. 

 

Wish you the best of luck. 

[NotBrad]

So, you are focusing primarily on an engine? Cool. 

[JimSolo]

I'm using UE4 as the engine to power PC side graphics, sound, physics, and weight simulation. Obviously an engine to handle the unit's IO interface will be required, though chances are I can simply modify a pre-existing BCI engine as a result.

 

No major updates to report as of yet since my time has been taken up with other projects in order to raise money to work on this. That said, I've had discussions with my lawyers and got some contracts written up for potential employees. Still waiting on confirmation of it all though.

 

Also, coding sucks.

[NotBrad]

Not meaning to put that down or anything, but wouldn't that be a poor engine choice? I mean kinda hard to choose a different boat mid-voyage but wouldn't that new floating-point rendering concept work better that UE4? I mean the brain actually predicts a great deal of information and supplements it in to provide better visual resolution and auditory quality, this would be terribly lacking unless you were to use an engine that provides high enough visual output without too much overhead(which as far as I know, UE has it's fair share of overhead). But I am no expert and will refrain from cutting you and your progress down when I don't actually know how you are implementing the engine and what else would be running alongside it.

[Puppy7718]

Hi I would like to help to and be a potiental partner but I'm only 14 and I don't know how much I could contribute to this. I am going to go to a highschool for coding and I'm also studying the nervous system. I've been interested in something like the nerve gear for a long time now. And I'm really excited with what I've read from you. You're really dedicated to this and I know that the information you share is very limited, but how much have you gotten done. Now I don't mean like the physical product but like with parts. Since you were talking about an engine used for it. Is it a small one or a large one? Again I would love to join when you start taking people.

[Operadog]

Jim I have been trying to study all I can in this, saying that I am not a person with many skills in any forms of science, I do know you would need to be able to distinguish brain signals from each other. You would also have to send signals to the brain to put the consumer in a sleep paralysis. This could be dangerous depending on how this happens. Hitting the log out button would have to tell the body to wake, and could cause potential brain damage if you can't slowly take the body put of sleep slowly. It's like when someone splashes you with water to wake up when you are in a deep sleep. Your heart beats to fast when this happens, imagine someone with heart problems doing this. We could give them heart attack! If you every need a researcher, social media person, or help with design msg me

 

I might be wrong though

 

I realized that what I said before makes no sense I really don't think someone would have a heart attack unless they were scared in the game

[JimSolo]

It was more a case of what I had available when I started. I've owned full license for UE4 and its source code since the day it was released. If something comes along that is better, I'll do a merge. I'm legally allowed to strip UE4 down to its knickers if I so desire. Given how it's written in C++ which is a common language any subsetory engines that come along (or my team build) in order to build the system can probably be integrated relatively seamlessly.

 

Getting hold of usable hardware is still a problem. Money wise. I'm traveling away in a few weeks to meet with some old contacts to see if I can get my hands on a full medical spec EEG BCI interface to tinker with. Hopefully since it's older tech it won't cost me a kidney. Fingers crossed.

 

In the meantime, what little code work I can do to make things run is being done, slowly but surely. God I hate code.

[NotBrad]

Just my two cents here, but wouldn't there be difficulties cross correlating positional info from the brain without a means to calculate the actual movement of the real body during calibration?

 

Just a thought here, but an articulated non-powered exoskeleton with instrumentation for calculating the positional changes in limbs combined with an effective calibration program, (which would require a massive library of reference information) could potentially spell true progress within this as-of-right-now dead field. The problems I see with this concept is a lack of being able to correlate a signal with more than just the effort of moving a limb or muscle. I think the only way to actually produce any FullDive product is to bridge the gap between brain output and nerve input.

[Alendar]

Jim I have been trying to study all I can in this, saying that I am not a person with many skills in any forms of science, I do know you would need to be able to distinguish brain signals from each other. You would also have to send signals to the brain to put the consumer in a sleep paralysis. This could be dangerous depending on how this happens. Hitting the log out button would have to tell the body to wake, and could cause potential brain damage if you can't slowly take the body put of sleep slowly. It's like when someone splashes you with water to wake up when you are in a deep sleep. Your heart beats to fast when this happens, imagine someone with heart problems doing this. We could give them heart attack! If you every need a researcher, social media person, or help with design msg me

 

I might be wrong though

 

I realized that what I said before makes no sense I really don't think someone would have a heart attack unless they were scared in the game

 

Hi everyone! I think exactly the same about sleep paralysis: this is the way it should woork since this is the key to lucid dream. I think the aim of the device should be to put te user into lucid (and maintain sleep paralysis to not turn the user into a sleep walker) dream artificialy, then just to be a link that stream images from the computer to the brain, analyse the user reaction and calculate the appropriate modification in the images send by the computer (just like with a classic 3D game and a gamepad for exemple).

 

To wake up the player, I assume there is an average "wake up time", witch should be use as a log out delay when the user choose to turn the VR off.

[Gamer1]

So just a question, is this thread still active? 

 

And any updates?

Edited January 27, 2016 by Gamer1

[17robots]

Not sure Gamer1

[Gamer1]

Thanks for replying.

[JimSolo]

Well it will be now.

 

Life has taken a turn for the worst for me in more than one way. Needless to say this announcement has ticked me off considerably and I'm going to go into this and take the bull by the horns. No more fixing life. I'll live with the ****ness if it means getting some of this done.

 

In the next few days I'll start sending PMs to people and arranging to speak on my personal skype to figure out what can and can't be done. I'll start scouring these threads to see what's come up but I already know what I need to do.

 

Don't think anyones ever developed a technology out of pure rage but, hey, first time for everything.

Edited February 23, 2016 by JimSolo

[bobbobkilu]

No, you definitely wouldn't be the first to develop something out of rage. It takes a powerful driving force to get through the obstacles.

 

I know there are some of us here that will help out however we can. I'm in it for the long run too.

[Gamer1]

I wouldn't be of help right now, I know that (just a junior in highschool).  Hopefully in the future though I could be of help.  I am sorry to hear about you're life, I hope it gets better.  Don't let life get you down.  I would like to stay updated on progress though.  Thanks for responding and I hope development is going well. 

 

Sorry if these sentences seem like a jumbled mess.

Edited February 23, 2016 by Gamer1

[CraigD]

Life has taken a turn for the worst for me in more than one way. Needless to say this announcement has ticked me off considerably and I'm going to go into this and take the bull by the horns. No more fixing life. I'll live with the ****ness if it means getting some of this done.

I wouldn’t worry or get angry about IBM Japan, Bandai Namco, and Aniplex’s “Sword Art Online The Beginning”. They’re not promoting the NerveGear-type brain-computer interfaces we’ve been discussing in the forum, but a game using the graphics and plot content of SAO and on-the-market now VR headsets and motion controls. The difference in these technologies is bicycles-to-airplanes, except at present, airplanes (near-perfect BCIs) haven’t been invented yet. If you are interested in BCIs like the fictional NerveGear, you’ve nothing to worry about yet concerning competition from practical, product-making companies like the above.

 

Aniplex made and distributed the SAO amine, so by all rights, along with writer Reki Kawahara, they own its story and art, so can partner with whoever they like to make more (they’ve already made 4+ games with Bandai Namco) video games of it. Thought the stories are fun and the art pretty, I don’t think it’s extraordinary, other than for inspiring so many people to work toward realizing new generations of BCIs.

 

In the next few days I'll start sending PMs to people and arranging to speak on my personal skype to figure out what can and can't be done. I'll start scouring these threads to see what's come up but I already know what I need to do.

If you’re open to advice, mine is stop pretending to be a tech startup company! If you’re seriously interested in developing a BCI like the NerveGear you saw in SAO, acknowledge that a lot of basic neuroscience and biomedical engineering research must happen before such a product can be made, and focus on that.

 

I think you’re badly misunderstanding the current state of the art in BCIs. For example you wrote

I'm using UE4 as the engine to power PC side graphics, sound, physics, and weight simulation. Obviously an engine to handle the unit's IO interface will be required, though chances are I can simply modify a pre-existing BCI engine as a result.

and

Getting hold of usable hardware is still a problem. Money wise. I'm traveling away in a few weeks to meet with some old contacts to see if I can get my hands on a full medical spec EEG BCI interface to tinker with.

How did that work out for you? Did you find a “pre-existing BCI engine”? What is it (link or reference)?

 

If you followed through on these, I suspect you discovered there are a fee pretty cheap kits from controlling games with EEG output – the Emotive EPOC most common among them – but that these are purely brain reading devices, and very clumsy at that, based on EEG, which is the measurement of small voltages on the scalp, capable of detecting only very general brain states, such as relaxation and concentration, and with more accuracy, facial muscle movement. A much higher resolution commercial machine, Cyberkinetics’ Braingate, exists, but requires brain surgery to implant, so is suitable only for use by medical clinicians, not game designers.

 

BCI’s that “write” to the brain are very rare, and very experimental. The only ones that comes to mind is the Dobelle Eye. Unfortunately, research on this promising system, which actually temporarily restored partial sight to fewer than 16 patient in the early 2000s, stopped when its inventor and main promotor, William Dobelle, died in 2004, and has not been resumed by others.

 

To return to my bicycles-to-airplanes analogy, I think you’re focused on what color to make the interior of your airliner, when the state of the art hasn’t yet seen the Wright brothers figure out how to make controllable wings and effective propellers. You need to be focusing on the basic science, not the business, of BCIs.