Playing Pong With Your Mind

It seems [Charles Moyes] and [Mengxiang Jiang] won’t suffer from the sore wrists and thumbs from an Atari controller any longer. They built a version of Pong played by concentrating and relaxing while wearing an EEG headset.

Right now, there’s only enough hardware for one player; when the player operating the red paddle concentrates the paddle moves up – relax, it goes down.

The hardware portion of the build is fairly tricky business. [Chuck] and [Mengxiang] built a circuit to amplify the tiny voltages between their ears into something a microcontroller can read. The circuit is loosely based on this Arduino EEG build, but highly refined as the elegance of an ATMega644 requires.

The EEG amplifier has a cutoff of under 50 Hz, perfect for reading the Alpha waves correlated with concentration. The oscillations from the skull-cap are sent through the ATMega to MATLAB where after a pass through an FFT the brain waves are converted to mouse scroll wheel output.

There’s a demo video available where you can see spectators screaming at the poor test subject telling him to relax and concentrate on command. You can check that out after the break.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYQfdA2tXbc&w=470]

[Charles Moyes] and [Mengxiang Jiang] sent in their 

2 thoughts on “Playing Pong With Your Mind

  1. “The circuit is loosely based on this Arduino EEG build, but highly refined as the elegance of an ATMega644 requires.”

    Two-a-side, as tennis, anyone?
    ‘GO HOME TEAM!!!’
    ‘Really, I was cheering in my head.’

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