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OCZ's Neural Impulse Actuator The flying car of control schemes by Cyril Kowaliski on the Tech Report
OCZ OCZMSNIA NIA
Neural Impulse Actuator
Introducing the Neural Impulse Actuator from the state-of-the-art computer technology company OZC. This is an announcement I've been waiting since March to make when the product went into manufacture. Finally the NIA is shipping and the starting to create excitement.
OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA) marks a new era in gaming. Rather than being a substitute for a mouse, the nia is a pioneering new peripheral to be used in conjunction with your mouse for a more immersive gaming experience. The NIA is compatible with any PC game using keyboard input past, present, or future. Predefined profiles included with the software allow the gamer to develop their own NIA—memory to launch the desired behavior of their character and shoot with the “blink of an eye”, without lifting a finger.
Play Games Using Biosignals
Translate electrical biosignals of your body directly into computer commands and take advantage of total immersion into game play. Customize behavioral profiles of your character and let your subconsciousness take over.
Hone Your Reflexes
Where others have to practice reaction times, you can use reflex-based game play to get the better of your opponents by cutting your reaction time by 50%.
Use Space-Age Technology The headband uses carbon nanofiber-based sensors to provide the highest possible dynamic range for the recording of bioelectrical signals that are amplified and digitized and further de-convoluted into computer commands.
Become Your Character
Streaming biopotentials into the computer and witnessing real-time feedback through the game will result in a novel way to experience virtual reality.
Enter a virtual world where abstractions like keyboard commands are replaced by intentions converted into tensions and translated into command structures.
According to Dr. Michael Schuette (Neurobioligist & OCZ VP of Technology)explains that the NIA works by reading bio-potentials. These include activities of the brain, the autonomous nervous system and muscles - all of which are captured using embrace sensors located on the OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator headband, amplified and sent to the PC via USB 2.0.
This USB headband translates 'biopotentials', that's tiny electrical changes on the surface of the skin, and translates them to inputs along various control axes, minimizing the need for game controllers. The biopotentials are broken into frequency specific components that allow a reasonably fine granularity of control for the novice user, after a short period of adaptation, the controls become essentially a streaming of body signals into the computer that don't really require any further "thinking" but become sort of second nature.
Until recently this analysis required a great deal of processing power, meaning that in a uni-processor environment the game running on a users PC would often be competing for CPU resources against the NIA application. However, thanks to the popularity of multi-core processors, the software is now able to offload a lot of the "decoding" to other cores in the processor improving the performance of the multi-threaded application.
The NIA isn't going to translate thoughts, such as 'shoot' or 'run forward', into corresponding inputs, the technology simply isn't that sophisticated yet (plus you'd probably have to drill holes in your skull for that sort of thing). Instead, most of the input comes from muscular movements, such as frowns, expression changes and eye movements, instead of brain waves.
What it does do is measure the strength of the electrical signal it's receiving, so if you're clenching your jaw hard, for example, that will top out the Muscle axis, where as less strained movements will have it wavering somewhere in the middle.
While it's not strictly mind control, when you accidentally shoot an enemy, before you've even registered them, because of some subconscious facial twitch, it'll certainly feel that way - there's a noticeable and impressive drop in reaction times, particularly when it comes to firing in a fast-paced first person shooter.
Besides games, the NIA will be used as hardware for a variety of other interesting mind and self improvement related purposes. For example, an open source project to develop software for using the NIA as a lucid dreaming device is underway called the NIA Redreamer.
I'll be writing more about the NIA including the science behind it in upcoming posts.
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