Development of brain computer interface for VR-based ubiquitous environment control system

Abstract

This thesis describes the development of the framework for Brain computer interface (BCI) and Virtual reality (VR) interfaced Ubiquitous environment control system. The Virtual reality offers the artificial environment which produces immersion and same temporal-spatial information as the real environment and the characteristic makes Virtual reality safe and effective interface to control real environment with the BCI which has low information transmission rate and low degree of input mode. Recently, Virtual reality is one of the main application fields of the BCI mainly because of its interesting and immersive characteristics. However the relatively high error rate of BCI can easily cause the well known problem - location missing in the virtual environment. The problem severely degrades the usability of the Virtual reality and furthermore it can causes serious physiological problems such as headache, palpitation, fatigue, etc. which are known as the symptoms of the cyber sickness. As a result, there are a few limited projects which used the navigation in the Virtual environment with BCI. In this thesis, I proposed the Locking mechanism which restricts an input degree of freedom in the virtual environment to enhance the usability and to prevent the cyber sickness for system. The network based general framework for BCI-VR interfaced ubiquitous real environment control system was developed by the feedbacks from the progress and results of the preliminary experiment. Then I conducted experiments to evaluate the suggested method and the framework and got promising result. This framework can be extended to the complex context-aware service which is based on the system for motion disabled people and other various applications which use the information from the brain wave.