2017 off to an exciting start! We are now finished with all Kickstarter and pre-order fulfillment. If you were a Kickstarter backer or pre-order customer, we want to thank you for your invaluable support and patience. We hope you are happy with your new OpenBCI equipment. If you have questions or feedback, please reach out to us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

In this month’s Newsletter:

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, we want to show you our love. Between now and March 15 we are initiating an epic 15% discount on all OpenBCI products. There’s no better time than now to jump on-board! Use the code “We <3 You” at checkout. This promotion is only valid for purchases made through our online store.

The thing we love most about OpenBCI is our amazingly diverse and inspiring community of hackers, neuroscientists, makers, and more! To celebrate you feature one or two community projects here each month. If you are interested in being featured or know someone who has an interesting OpenBCI project, please fill out this interest form.

This month we want to share “A BCI Responsive game engironment in VR” built by Juri

Using the OpenBCI Cyton Board, Juri has managed to use EEG inputs to control various commands in a VR game. The game environment was created using Unreal Engine 4 for the Oculus rift, and was combined with the Leap Motion controller to provide the user with more immersion depth. Below is a short video demo of his interactive VR game:

Juri has founded a company whose aim is to create a place where people can come together and use the environment as an emergent, gamified brain-training tool for learning and new self experience. If the first stage of the game is successful, he plans to create a multiplayer VR world, where users can collaborate to affect the environment and use their “powers” to battle each other. He hopes to make the project publicly available soon.

You can reach out to Juri to express any thoughts, opinions, or give feedback through his website. In addition, if you have the OpenBCI hardware and want to try his software, reach out to him as well.

“3D printed enclosure for 16 channel OpenBCI system with rechargeable battery” by Dan and Trent

Trent and Dan developed a small enclosure for the OpenBCI Cyton + Daisy board and the best part is that they decided to share the designs with the community. The box has touch proof sockets on one end for electrode attachments, space for a 3400mAh Li Ion Battery, a Powerboost 500C charging board for USB charging and power, and much more. You can find the .stl files here.

Project: AYA by Yi Zhu, Danli Hu, Jiyeon, Xianghan Ma

Aya is an interactive narrative about a little fish in the deep sea. The idea behind the experience is to allow the user to interact with OpenBCI more intuitively, in a seamless and fun way. The team from Conor’s class at Parsons School of Design embedded OpenBCI hardware in fish-like headwear, which looks like the main character in the game, Aya. The game uses OpenBCI to collect EMG data and uses that data to control Aya. Below is a video of the UI!

We hope that your experience with OpenBCI has been awesome! Now that the Ganglion and Mark IVs are in the wild we want to ask everyone to fill out our community survey and tell us about their experiences.

Your feedback is extremely valuable to us! Your answers will be anonymous and will help shape the future of OpenBCI!

We are very excited to announce that we are actively working on adding a new “Networking Widget” to the OpenBCI GUI. This will enable OpenBCI users to establish live data streams to other software with the click of a few buttons. The widget will support outbound OSC, UDP, LSL, and Serial/COM. The first version of the widget should be ready in the coming weeks. Once it’s finished we’ll release a new version of the OpenBCI GUI through our website and Github. Stay tuned!

This was the third year for the UW’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE) hackathon. Students had 36 hours to come up with and demo a BCI creation. You can find more about the event on their twitter page! AJ (wearing the Ultracortex in the back right) spent weekend at the hackathon, running OpenBCI workshops, and assisting the CSNE hackers with the OpenBCI gear we loaned for the hackathon.

From everyone at OpenBCI, we say thank you. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, don’t hesitate to reach out: [email protected].

All the best,

The OpenBCI Team