[kcoul]

I agree. The emerging field of data science can help us to make more sense of the patterns and lack thereof that can become apparent after high fidelity capture of our brainwaves.

On that note, I would have to say I was a bit disappointed by the Neurosky Mindwave Mobile unit I received - despite being able to bypass their simplified attention/meditation/blinking reduction of the raw input signals and capture the {delta, theta, ..., gamma} filtered bands for further processing, many people (myself included) complained about the apparently low quality of the data, specifically showing large amounts of delta band activity and little else. I resigned that the low-cost interface was simplified to the point where it was a novelty and little else.

Now I am narrowing it down to OpenBCI vs. Muse vs Emotiv. Picking the right one for the handful of projects I want to use an EEG for is proving to be difficult. I'm simultaneously attracted to the ability to take matters more into my own hands with OpenBCI, and the ability to just get started right away with a product like Muse or EPOC.

I'm curious if you were planning to use the Rift for photic entrainment. I haven't seen anyone else intending to get into photic stimulation with the Rift besides a project or two that never seemed to take off like Ocunaut, so if you do plan to, it would be great to collaborate somehow.

Some research has indicated that photic entrainment might be even more effective than the various kinds of aural entrainment (binaural, monaural, isochronic).

http://www.mindalive.com/articleone.htm (1/3rd of the way down, Frederick, Lubar, Rasey, Brim, & Blackburn, 1999)

My impressions from that study are that eyes-closed photic-only worked best for two reasons:

1. Closing the eyelids blocks out extraneous light which reduces interference. 2. No one knew how to properly combine the entrainment modalities yet.

However I believe that if a proper theoretical model is applied, AVE techniques might then become more effective, perhaps even more so if tactile audio were involved as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio-visual_entrainment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_sound

To me, a unit like the DK1 is not really usable for anything besides this sort of thing. After all, panning anywhere nearly as quickly as would be needed in a game on a DK1 would get most nauseated fairly quickly. (The DK2 is much better in this regard, and Crystal Cove hopefully even more so)

But the one saving grace for the DK1 was things done very slowly and deliberately, like a relaxed exploration of the Tuscany demo or something like this: http://guidedmeditationvr.com/

[MichaelAO]

You hit the nail on the head as far as what I was thinking with the Rift.

After experimenting with binaural beats out of the Monroe institute, I think a similar auditory experience is important. You're definitely right that together they could be quite powerful. My email is in my profile if you'd like to chat more.

Right now, I'm leaning towards the Muse. Does anyone have any suggestions for a hacker friendly EEG?

[heynk]

I backed the indiegogo campaign with hopes that Muse would be very hacker friendly, but so far their SDK support is limited. They provide very low level interfaces for interacting with the data over bluetooth, but are behind scheduling on releasing their 'LibMuse' which promises to be a higher level SDK (in multiple languages) to help people build apps. I don't have links right now but after browsing their forums they seem to have de-prioritized their developer tools in favor of their own in-house apps. This is disappointing both as a developer who'd like to harness my Muse and as a consumer who wants to be able to do more things with my Muse than their single Calm app [1]

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/muse-calm/id849841170?mt=8

[kcoul]

Sounds good.

This was what I was referring to above, seemingly the most hacker friendly EEG of them all, and shipping in January: http://www.openbci.com/

My research indicated that monaural and isochronic patterns are more effective than binaural.

However, if binaural beats were synchronized with optic driving (an audio pulse arrives in the given ear at the same moment a photic pulse arrives at the corresponding eye), then this kind of integrated approach could certainly trump them both (and simple optic driving as well).