Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA) - review

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Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA) - review

Post by Sethioz »

Well ive been messing around with NIA for about 2-3 hours by now. Seems very promising, but its extremely hard to control alpha and beta brain waves. Tension and Glance are quite easy to control tho.

Tension is when you move your eyebrows, bite your teeth together or push your tongue against ceiling of mouth. If someone thinks that it is only muscle based, WRONG. i put it on my hand and tried to simulate the movement, nothing happens at all. It must mix muscle movement with brainwaves or looks specifically for face movements and doesn't react to anything else. also my forehead doesn't even move when i bite my teeth together or move my tongue, however i find it very easy to control using tongue and teeth movements. using eyebrows tension seem to be too sensitive, however you can adjust all that, sensitivity and smoothness.

Glance reacts when you move your eyes, i can easily get glance moving and either keep it maxed or at lowest, but using it to strafe .. i don't get it at all. it seems extremely hard. i try looking left and right, but it doesn't seem to have any effect really. i tried blinking left eye and right eye, but it wants to go left all the time, even if i blink my eyes, it still pops left. I need to put way more time into this. I find it useful to use glance for something like fire or enter button, but it has to be calibrated so it wont react if you blink your eyes normally.

It also detects Alpha and Beta brainwaves, but i can't control them yet. they seem to be popping everwhere. it has alpha 1, 2 and 3 and Beta 1, 2 and 3.
Alpha 1 seem to be reacting to visuals. for example if i look around on screen it seem to react or when i spot something. its like brain's visual recognizition or something. Beta 3 seem to be reacting on toughts about movement, like when i think that i want to move my hand or leg, it seem to be reacting more than usual or when i move my hand or leg it seem to be reacting.
However Beta 3 seem to be reacting more to reading, when i was reading tutorial info, Beta 3 was almost at full at all times.

Now the bad side, seem to be that cable from headband to NIA box seem to be sensitive to interference. i was moving it little bit with hand and brainwaves popped around like crazy, while tension and glance didnt really move. Again, brainwaves are something that move with your body or can move without, so its extremely hard to master them.


Now as about hardware and software.
NIA itself is quite small metal box with blue lights in it, they show from bottom of NIA, from ventilation holes. so if you place it on table, it has nice blue glow under it.
Box itself is about the size of avarage computer mouse, just looks like a box and not the shape of mouse.
Headband is very flexible and seem to be some silicone based material with 3x2 sensors on front.
Installation is very easy, it uses USB between NIA box and PC and special cable from headband to NIA box.
No on/off switch, however it has some small button at back, it seems like its reset, no idea why its needed. i guess NIA is capable of crashing.

Software is about 100mb, it contains ping pong game and one FPS game for training. it also has interactive bars to show the brainwaves, tension and glance. Or in another view it shows whole brain and explains what area of brain causes what.
I completed tutorial map in that FPS game, however i dont understand it at all. i can easily move forward using tension and jump using more tension and at end of tension, its shoot, however i don't understand how can i shoot without jumping and moving forward. Im talking about default profile that is suppouse to work with training program. i dont get it at all. i can easily complete tutorial, but when i need to shoot, i shoot and then jump, its annoying. or maybe it meant to be, like if you play a game, you shoot and jump so it makes it harder for other to hit you.
strafe is also messed up as i explained about glance, cant get it to strafe at all.

I tested the training ping pong and i find it very easy using tension. well not very easy, but considering i had never used it before, i was able to beat the bot opponent for first time.


Now about system requirements. On my primary PC (quad core 3.6ghz, 8gb ram, 2gb GTX 550Ti) it runs perfectly, however i just tested it on my old laptop. it has 1.4ghz single core and 736mb RAM and NIA software has serious problems running on it. When going into test mode to see brainwaves, it lags very badly and even ping pong lags. so 1.4ghz cpu is definetly not enought for the software.


well at end i think its quite cool gadget, but if you expect to be a cyborg in games in no time, forget it. it takes a lot of time to control your brain, but i definetly think its possible. it has 8 "brainfingers", tension, glance, alpha 1 2 3 and beta 1 2 3 and each can have 4 sectors, meaning 4 buttons. so 32 buttons total with hold, delay ...etc functions.
it sure has lot of potential.
easiest way to put this .. think how long it will take someone to learn to type on keyboard like i do. i type 7-10 characters per second and obviously i do not even look at keyboard. i can have blank (no letters on keyboard).
i'd say 1-2 years unless you dedicate yourself to learn it.
same with babies, it takes years for babies to learn to walk.
it has potential, but using that potential is the hardest part.
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