Jessica Jowdy, Engineering & Computer Science

Creating a Brain-Computer Interface to Control Virtual Reality

A brain-computer interface (BCI) is a system that provides direct communication between cognitive activity and external systems. This project involved creating a BCI that allowed participants to learn how to control virtual reality using only their brain waves. The objective was to devise a novel BCI system that employed machine learning algorithms to recognize brain activity associated with imagined movements and repurpose this information to navigate through a virtual environment. Techniques used to accomplish this task included applying existing linear classifiers, such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs), to frequency domain representations of the data. On average, 86% of the test data points were classified accurately, proving that motor imagery has the potential to be utilized as an intelligent controller.