I'm a PhD student in a brain-machine interface lab at Stanford. This particular demonstration is not all that interesting since EEG control is extremely low bandwidth and particularly high noise.
Getting one or two degrees of freedom of control to turn a quadrotor is possible, but will never become a robust or fast method of control. The information content required from these EEG signals simply isn't there, and what is there is frequently swamped by any muscle movements like blinking, turning your head, etc.
It's possible to get much higher bandwidth and robustness with a cortical implant [1]. These provide single-neuron sensitivity and make it possible to record from several hundred neurons simultaneously, and achieve bitrates of 6-7 bps.
I am also a PhD student working on brain-computer interfaces.
I agree that this particular EEG system (it looks like an Emotiv EPOC) is fundamentally limited in bandwidth and quality of electrodes, and so I am surprised to see this level of control from it.
I would argue that other, higher quality EEG recording systems are much more practical than cortical implants for the foreseeable future, especially from the perspective of we hackers.
Check out the Wolpaw EEG lab. Good EEG brain-computer interfaces can, surprisingly, have comparable bitrates cortical implants - without having to crack the skull open.
Are you kidding? I'd estimate there is a small army of cyberpunk fans out there who would jump at the chance to use a mind-computer interface to control a robot.
Couldn't agree more. People do craziest of things for the sake of body art so there should be at least a couple of cyberpunk freaks out there with equal eagerness for modifying their bodies.
Getting one or two degrees of freedom of control to turn a quadrotor is possible, but will never become a robust or fast method of control. The information content required from these EEG signals simply isn't there, and what is there is frequently swamped by any muscle movements like blinking, turning your head, etc.
It's possible to get much higher bandwidth and robustness with a cortical implant [1]. These provide single-neuron sensitivity and make it possible to record from several hundred neurons simultaneously, and achieve bitrates of 6-7 bps.
[1] http://www.blackrockmicro.com/