Two days ago, I had a great day talking at AWE2020 about Brain Computer Interfaces in Virtual Reality. I chose this topic because I love Brain Computer Interfaces, I think they are the next generation of human interaction with technology, after the big immersive revolution. In fact, in this blog I have already written a very long deep-dive on BCIs, and also talked about Neuralink.
Looxid Labs, a Korean company working on a device able to detect brainwaves when the user is immersed in virtual reality, understood this interest of mine (have they read my mind?) and sent me a Looxid Link device to review. Here you are my impressions on this innovative VR accessory!
What is Looxid Link?
Looxid Link is an accessory for VR headsets, compatible with HTC Vive/Vive Pro and Oculus Rift S, that enables brainwaves reading. This means that using it, you can detect the current status of your mind.
With “status of your mind”, I don’t mean it can detect everything that is inside your brain (your dirty porn fantasies are still secret, don’t worry): Looxid Link is an EEG (electroencephalogram) device, it can read only the electrical signals that from your brain go through the thick barrier of your skull. These are the so-called “brain waves”, and can just give a very broad overview of what is happening inside your brain. EEG devices can detect if you are attentive, if you are stressed, if you are relaxed, or if you are using more the right or left part of your brain, but can’t understand the reasons behind such a status.
With Looxid Link, you have a device able to give you exactly these data. And it is amazing because it is affordable and it can be installed very easily on your VR headset. So you can create experiences mixing virtual reality and mind reading.
What are some of its possible applications?
You may wonder why you would like to mix VR and mind reading. Well, here you are some notable examples:
- You can create a meditation VR experience that actually detects if the user is relaxing and reacts accordingly;
- In general, you can create a VR psychological experience, and pair it with a device of this kind. VR is a great research field for psychologists because it can be very effective for exposure therapy. With this kind of EEG devices, you can gather data about the brain of the patient and for instance stop the experience if you detect that the stress levels of the patient become too high;
- You can create new game mechanics based on this: imagine a horror game that calibrates itself depending on your fear. Or better, imagine a scary enemy that can smell your fear, so you must stay cool or he will find you (yes, I’m thinking about you, Jeff of Half-Life: Alyx);
- You can create new interfaces mixing this with eye-tracking. Eye fixation + high attention level may mean selecting an object in a hands-free interface, for instance;
- You can create effective training experiences for people that undergo dangerous situations (e.g. police officers): the VR experience may train them not only about the procedure to follow, but also on how to keep calm during the whole process;
- When used in marketing, it can detect the arousal level of the users when they see different products or different campaigns associated with products.
As you can see, there is room both for makers to have fun and experiment, and for professionals to create enterprise products out of it.
Unboxing
The time has come for an unboxing video… so, here you are. Actually, it is not very sexy, since I received the devkits in just two simple packages, so the unboxing I show you doesn’t represent the one of the official product… but I love filming myself while opening cardboard boxes, so I have recorded it the same:
Setup
Setting up the Looxind Link has been a matter of one-two minutes. You have just to:
- Assemble the two parts found in the box, the facemask with the sensors and the little computational box;
- Remove the sponge from your Vive by detaching it from the velcro;
- Put the facemask given you by Looxid Labs, that you have assembled in point 1, in place of the original sponge that you have removed in step 2;
- Use the little USB micro cable provided in the box to connect the computational box with the spare USB port on your Vive.
And that’s it! Easy peasy for an object doing such a complicated thing. I’ve also made a video to show you how it is simple:
On the software side, all that you have to do is download the runtime called Looxid Core from this link and install it on your PC. I had a little problem with a version that wasn’t working on my PC, but Looxid Labs fixed it very fast.
Comfort
I’ll write this section to make my friend Rob Cole, expert in VR ergonomics, happy. How does the comfort of the Vive change with the new facemask and the sensor? Well, it is mostly the same, maybe just a bit worse: the sponge provided with the Looxid Link is a bit more rigid, so it feels less “fluffy” on the skin, but in my opinion, it is very ok. The headset is slightly more unbalanced by the more weight added on the front, but in my sessions, this has not been a huge deal.
The real problem is that sometimes the headset has to be moved because it may happen that when you are in the sweet spot, the EEG doesn’t read correctly the data from your forehead, and when the sensor is finally working, the headset is not comfortable on your head anymore. Either you have one sweet spot or the other. This is its biggest issue comfort-wise.
Demos
Looxid Labs provides you some free demos so that you can try your Looxid Link out of the box. The weird thing is that you have to download these demos making some 0$ purchases on their official store (WTF, why isn’t there just a demo pack somewhere to be downloaded?).
The demos are very simple, but they get straight to the point:
- 2D/3D Visualizer: it lets you see all the data detected by the Looxid Link: braiwaves, general brain status (attentive vs relaxed), etc…;
- Interaction Playground: it is a little VR experience where you choose a brain feature of your choice (e.g. attentive status, or left brain part activity, etc…) and if it goes above 50%, all the boxes in the room where you are get lit and start flying. If it goes below 50%, they fall down again. This can show you how you can make simple games that make you train your mental status in VR;
- VR Mind Care: a mindfulness relaxation experience, that puts you in a relaxing environment with a soothing voice inviting you to relax. The system detects if you are actually relaxed or not;
- Pyrokinesis: this is a little BCI game: you have to fight against a dragon, but to create your fireballs, you have to be in attentive state. The more you are attentive, the more you grow big fireballs that you can later throw to defeat the dragon. This is another example of a brain-training game.
Let me be honest: none of these demos is particularly exciting: they are short experiences, usually also very rough (some seem to be made using assets from the Unity Asset Store). But they are just some Proof Of Concepts to let you try the Looxid Link after you have bought it, to make you understand what are the features of the device, they don’t have to be full-fledged games.
SDK
There is a Unity SDK that you can use to create the brainwave-controlled VR experiences that you want. You can download it from GitHub, with already all the necessary packages and some demo scenes included. This is another weird choice: even if we don’t consider the fact that you can’t put the plugins of the headset vendors on your Github, when I import a plugin in my project, I don’t want to carry with me the samples. The Github big package is a nice to have, but I would prefer to also have a Unity package with just the necessary files of the plugin.
That said, the good thing of the unity sample package is that there is the opensource implementation of both the 3D Visualizer and the Interaction Playground described above, so you can learn by example how to get started with brainwaves-reading in Unity.
The SDK is also very straightforward to be used: there is a (yes, singleton) class called LooxidLinkData that offers you events (yes, observer pattern) that you can register on to get the new data read from the sensors. This data can be the rough one (the brainwaves), or the higher-level one (the overall status of the brain, e.g. “attentive”). Using this SDK is incredibly simple, and I love the fact that it lets you peek exactly the data that you want to analyze: you can even just get the brainwave measurements from a single sensor installed on the mask!
Performances
Does the brainwaves reading work well on the Looxid Link? I don’t have a professional EEG to make the comparison, so I can only rely on my impressions. And my impression is that it works well if compared with what there is on the market now, but the performances can be better.
I’m not a neuroscientist, but I can understand that is a bit weird that the device sometimes detects spikes of all the brainwave types together, which means that at high-level, the system detects that I’m both attentive, aroused and relaxed. This is a bit contradictory. I also tried relaxing without seeing the “relaxation” bar growing, or seeing it spiking for no reason. It is also weird that it detected a 100% relaxation state in a day where I was stressed like Philip J. Fry of Futurama after 99 coffees (the 100th put him into a nirvana state)
This can be due to the fact that to make an affordable and portable device, Looxid Labs has not been able to use a system similar to the one used in hospitals. But can also be that every person is different, and with every different way of wearing the headset the detections are different, and such a system would require a calibration for every person wearing it.
Regarding wearing it, it is very annoying that putting on my Vive, most of the times, at least one of the sensors on the forehead was not detecting any kind of brain activity, and so I had to move my Vive until I found the sweet spot for the Looxid Link, that of course was different from the sweet spot of the headset. Apart this from being uncomfortable, wearing the headset in a non-ideal position may influence the quality of the data reading.
Anyway, don’t misunderstand me: the detection is in line with other frontal brainwave reading devices like the ones by Neurosky. I’m not meaning it is bad, it is actually nice, but the data is not ultra-reliable, it is not like an EEG sensor that you can find in a healthcare facility.
Price and availability
Looxid Link is available on its official website for $299. It is compatible with HTC Vive/Pro and Oculus Rift S.
Final impressions
I was pleased by the Looxid Link: I tried it myself, and I also made my Chinese assistant try it and we both found it nice. I think it ticks lots of boxes: it is affordable, it is easy to set-up, it comes with opensource demos, it has a simple-to-be-used SDK. It is also easy to be bought: you don’t have to request a devkit in some strange way: you just buy it on the official store and that’s it.
If you want to experiment with mixing immersive realities and BCI, it can be one of the devices you have to look at. You can start playing around with training or healthcare experiences in a very short time. Its only defect is that it is comparable with the current other devices on the market that have a similar price: the brainwave reading precision is not top-notch and sometimes the detection may give some weird result.
All in all, I think it’s an interesting accessory: if you’re curious about trying it, head over to Looxid Labs website and buy it!
(Header image by Looxid Labs)