Eliciting steady-state visual evoked potentials by means of stereoscopic displays

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) provide users communication and control capabilities by analyzing their brain activity. A technique to implement BCIs, used recently also in Virtual Reality (VR) environments, is based on the Steady State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) detection. Exploiting the SSVEP response, BCIs could be implemented showing targets flickering at different frequencies and detecting which is gazed by the observer analyzing her/his electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. In this work, we evaluate the use of stereoscopic displays for the presentation of SSVEP eliciting stimuli, comparing their effectiveness between monoscopic and stereoscopic stimuli. Moreover we propose a novel method to elicit SSVEP responses exploiting the stereoscopic displays capability of presenting dichoptic stimuli. We have created an experimental scene to present flickering stimuli on an active stereoscopic display, obtaining reliable control of the targets' frequency independently for the two stereo views. Using an EEG acquisition device, we analyzed the SSVEP responses from a group of subjects. From the preliminary results, we got evidence that stereoscopic displays represent valid devices for the presentation of SSVEP stimuli. Moreover, the use of different flickering frequencies for the two views of a single stimulus proved to elicit non-linear interactions between the stimulation frequencies, clearly visible in the EEG signal. This suggests interesting applications for SSVEP-based BCIs in VR environments able to overcome some limitations imposed by the refresh frequency of standard displays, but also the use of commodity stereoscopic displays to implement binocular rivalry experiments

TOWARDS STEADY-STATE VISUALLY EVOKED POTENTIALS BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACES FOR VIRTUAL REALITY ENVIRONMENTS EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT INTERACTION

In the last two decades, Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have been investigated mainly for the purpose of implementing assistive technologies able to provide new channels for communication and control for people with severe disabilities. Nevertheless, more recently, thanks to technical and scientific advances in the different research fields involved, BCIs are gaining greater attention also for their adoption by healthy users, as new interaction devices. This thesis is dedicated to to the latter goal and in particular will deal with BCIs based on the Steady State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP), which in previous works demonstrated to be one of the most flexible and reliable approaches. SSVEP based BCIs could find applications in different contexts, but one which is particularly interesting for healthy users, is their adoption as new interaction devices for Virtual Reality (VR) environments and Computer Games. Although being investigated since several years, BCIs still poses several limitations in terms of speed, reliability and usability with respect to ordinary interaction devices. Despite of this, they may provide additional, more direct and intuitive, explicit interaction modalities, as well as implicit interaction modalities otherwise impossible with ordinary devices. This thesis, after a comprehensive review of the different research fields being the basis of a BCI exploiting the SSVEP modality, present a state-of-the-art open source implementation using a mix of pre-existing and custom software tools. The proposed implementation, mainly aimed to the interaction with VR environments and Computer Games, has then been used to perform several experiments which are hereby described as well. Initially performed experiments aim to stress the validity of the provided implementation, as well as to show its usability with a commodity bio-signal acquisition device, orders of magnitude less expensive than commonly used ones, representing a step forward in the direction of practical BCIs for end users applications. The proposed implementation, thanks to its flexibility, is used also to perform novel experiments aimed to investigate the exploitation of stereoscopic displays to overcome a known limitation of ordinary displays in the context of SSVEP based BCIs. Eventually, novel experiments are presented investigating the use of the SSVEP modality to provide also implicit interaction. In this context, a first proof of concept Passive BCI based on the SSVEP response is presented and demonstrated to provide information exploitable for prospective applications