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EEG Cat Ears (2018)
- dmitrygr 5y agoBought a similar thing a decade ago: https://www.necomimi.com/ https://www.necomimi.com/
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mysterydip 5y agoReally extensive write-up, very informative.
- phnofive 5y ago(2018) Hoping for a v2 but couldn't find one.
- actionfromafar 5y agoVery cool! This triggered another idea - our ears already can move a slight bit by its own muscles. Can't we read these muscle movements, and amplify them by controlling the servo Cat Ears in sync? Might be easier to learn to control, maybe.
- gambiting 5y ago>>our ears already can move a slight bit by its own muscles. Not everyone can do that though. My wife can easily twitch her ears by just thinking about it, I cannot no matter how hard I try - it's just like there is no nerve link to whatever is there.
- praptak 5y agoI only discovered how to move my ears when I was like 8 years old. This suggests the nerves are there, just very non-obvious to control.
- totetsu 5y agoWhat does it feel like? Smiling without the smile?
- praptak 5y agoA bit hard to describe (how would you describe what moving your arm feels like?) I'd say a bit like raising my eyebrows, but the "tension" is behind the ears.
- totetsu 5y agoOkay if I raise my eyebrows my ears come along for the ride.. but I can move my eyebrows without the ears if I think of it as moving my forehead.. so to isolate the ears only I need to lock the eyebrows at max up or down and try and wiggle them and see how it feels..
- praptak 5y agoYeah, maybe start with trying to move your forehead and the whole scalp.
- webmaven 5y ago> I'd say a bit like raising my eyebrows, but the "tension" is behind the ears. For me the tension is pretty far back, basically halfway to the back of my head on either side, and covers a vaguely oblong patch that is about 1.5 square inches.
- user_7832 5y agoDo you have (loose) spectacles? If yes, you can try to make the spectacles move back and forth (moving back requires flexing the muscle, spectacles moved front is the "natural" position). If not, maybe take a friend's pair? Lol just kidding, just use sunglasses. Honestly it's not some major movement and I only have 1 degree of motion properly under control - I'm sure there's more that I can't. It's not a very significant thing irl.
- goodpoint 5y agoThe nerves are there. You "just" need to discover them.
- gambiting 5y agoI mean, I've been trying for 30 years of my life and haven't been able to, so yeah, no idea how you'd go about it.
- themeiguoren 5y agoStick you fingers in the space between your ear and your head, and you can feel the muscles moving there. That should really help with building a mind-muscle connection since it’s hard to get feedback otherwise.
- deredede 5y agoI spent hours in front of a mirror a decade ago until I was able to move my left ear. Lots of trying to move things that either did nothing or made me clench my jaw or close my eyes, before eventually "feeling" my ear, and then a whole lot more of that before seing it move. It was exhausting, and even though I have a faint consciousness of the corresponding muscles in my right ear --- I have no desire to spend that time and energy again.
- robbedpeter 5y agoIt makes sense for actors to do that type of thing, or maybe martial artists seeking to discipline every part of their body, but the time needed is too high for what's mostly a party trick for regular people. Then again, maybe it gets easier with other muscles as you practice and master more things - could it help overall coordination, maybe improve typing speed or balance?
- goodpoint 5y agoWe instinctively "try" and discover our motor control as babies, depending on how much feedback we get the movement. Unsurprisingly, hands are very popular. Other things like proprioception of our backs and general posture can go unnoticed even as adults. I.e. it takes careful focus and training to [re]learn how and what to move.
- amelius 5y agoProbably similar to how tongue rolling is genenic.
- yoz-y 5y agoIt would be a better control mechanism. NeuroSky (the headset used here) is only good as an eye blink detector and even at that it’s not great. EEG reading on the forehead, without gel is always really bad because there are no obviously interpretable signals (frontal cortex is way more complex than, say motor regions or the occipital nerve), the skin is tougher due to no hair, and is way too much muscle interference. Something with two electrodes behind ears (or wherever the muscles responsible for moving ears are) could be even used as a tool to train to move your (human) ears.
- musingsole 5y agoThe Muse 2 headset has ear and forehead sensors. I'm not too up on EEG, but I'd believed the ear sensors were just for grounding/baselining what's read from the forehead. Blink detection at least is pretty robust when I've played with it. https://choosemuse.com/muse-2/ https://choosemuse.com/muse-2/
- yoz-y 5y agoyeah, ear sensors are for a ground and a reference, to be able to remove noise from the EEG (basically you are trying to have a channel which has no EEG) Muse is more or less couple of neurosky's glued together. With multiple sensors you can at least get to know which eye blinked, extract stuff like raised eyebrows and such. But dry electrodes on the forehead will never really give any good EEG results. There was a paper when somebody managed to get P300 working with neurosky, but they needed to average something like a 1000 trials. This is tens of minutes of looking at a flashing screen.
- daef 5y agoI just found https://alexandre.barachant.org/blog/2017/02/05/P300-with-muse.html https://alexandre.barachant.org/blog/2017/02/05/P300-with-mu...
- anfractuosity 5y agoI saw something where someone tried to do that - https://hackaday.com/2020/01/02/assistive-technolgy-switch-is-actuated-using-your-ear-muscles/ https://hackaday.com/2020/01/02/assistive-technolgy-switch-i... It seems to use a type of camera to measure movement in the ear.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoI was thinking perhaps add a pair of microphones to the headset and have the ears react to loud sounds — attempt to angle towards the source of the loud sound. Mux that in with the neural input.
- nonrandomstring 5y agoI sat behind a girl at school whose ears would involuntarily move. Like quite a _lot_! Like a dog. It freaked everyone right out.
- sleightofmind 5y agoThe daughter of a friend of mine (just a grade-school-aged child at the time) demonstrated for me how she could hold one eye completely fixed (staring straight ahead) and move the other eye independently, turning it outwards as far as she could had she been moving both eyes. The motion of the eye being moved was very smooth and deliberate. I found it absolutely fascinating and baffling. How does one even discover they have such an ability?
- caycep 5y agohonestly, looking at the devices and not seeing the EEG traces, I half suspect that a lot of the input is already muscle artifact. Even w/ dedicated medical EEG w/ the fancy electrodes and conducting goop, it's plagued w/ a ton of eyelid/scalp muscle artifact.
- twobitshifter 5y agoOr even if you don't use the muscles, is there a way to build something that isn't a noisy servo.
- Nursie 5y agoAwesome project! We had some neko-mimi's a few years ago but the ear clip broke very quickly.
- sebastianvoelkl 5y agoThere was a really old version of this already 9 years ago* *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP8kVEvm6h8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP8kVEvm6h8
- resonious 5y agoThose exact ears were reference material for this project. > I began by looking at the youtube concept video for the necomimi brainwave-controlled ears. My intent wasn't to copy their implementation, but I was curious what kind of motion they had decided on.
- snarfy 5y agoNeat. I bought a pair at PAX many years ago. Sadly they stopped working after a week or so.
- LoveMortuus 5y agoThe ones that you linked are called Necomimi, I bought them and they still work. The one thing that they should really improve is the quality of the motors because they are extremely loud which kind of defeats the point of having a mode which shows you your meditation state and relaxed state. I wish someone would make an update and improved version. Another thing that bothered me is that it needs FOUR AAA batteries, which is good from the environment point of view. But very bulky and kinda annoying from the UX point of view. The same company also made a tail, but I didn't have a chance to test it nor did I buy it.
- svnpenn 5y agoSite does not work at all without JavaScript, I just get a completely white page.
- Mashimo 5y agoDang, that 3D printer needs some calibrating :D The first layer looks horrible (Or it's very old)
- pilotneko 5y agoIt’s a Makerbot cupcake, which is pretty old by this point (~10 years). One of the first “affordable“ 3D printers. https://makerbot.fandom.com/wiki/Cupcake https://makerbot.fandom.com/wiki/Cupcake
- KaiserPro 5y agoI do love a good write up. The concept and execution is great, but what's most important is that they have shared the journey.
- alexpotato 5y agoI was really impressed with the sketches. I always thought those were more of an engineering "suggested best practice" but this is a good reminder that a visual sketch can act as a reference while also showing how pieces might fit together.
- gg2222 5y agoHere is a fun demonstration of the Necomimi cat ears that were noted as reference material for the project. https://youtu.be/fOrqZjvQ0JQ?t=527 https://youtu.be/fOrqZjvQ0JQ?t=527 Amazing work building your own btw!
- Animats 5y agoYes, it's a Necomimi clone. The big year for those was 2012. They detect three mental states - idle/relaxed, attentive, and surprised. I saw a group of cosplay girls wearing them at a convention. Someone called out the name of one of the girls. Her ears, and not the ears of the others, popped up. A review reported someone playing a video game had their ears in the "attentive" position while playing a level, and the ears would droop between levels. Good idea, but too bulky. It needed cosplay big hair to hide the machinery. The big head-mounted box is mostly the 4 AAA batteries. If someone revives this, the mechanism needs to be about half the size and better fitted to a head. The Nekomimi people also came out with a powered cat tail, but that was a total flop.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TruthWillHurt 5y agoNice project, but obviously from the single electrode and its placement, the only EEG signal you'll get is eye-movement artifacts...
- writegit 5y agoSuper cool project and write up. What's the state of EEG these days? Last I interacted with one of these systems it seemed more like confimation bias from noise. Had a buddy who bought a "high end" headset, shaved his head to "improve the signal", and it appeared for all intents and purposes that it was mostly only reading concusive activity. He would "show me it's working" by tapping on the exterior of the sensors to get it to display a spike. Conceptually these systems "make sense" to me, ie. the brain uses electromagnetism to function so one should be able to sense/manipulate those vectors, but an FMRI is MASSIVE and requires a 1-3 Tesla electromagnet to get its fidelity, and even then is only measuring blood flow and correlating that to brain activity. So what's the hope that a tiny sensor resting on your skin will actually correspond to anything happening inside the brain?
- SkittyDog 5y agoEEG and MRI are based on two completely different physical measurements. They have nothing whatsoever to do with each otyer, in terms of why they work. Medical EEG machines are very small, and their size relative to MRI machines does not factor into how effective the EEG is. I mean, would you doubt that a stethescope can work, because it's so much smaller than an MRI? No, that would be ridculous. Same with your comparison vs EEGs. Just read the WP articles on MRIs and EEGs. You'll understand it.
- writegit 5y agoIs this written from the perspective of experience with contemporary EEG systems or wiki reading? > They have nothing whatsoever to do with each otyer, in terms of why they work. I thought my comment made my knowledge of this explicit? Also I was referring to FMRI. >> and even then is only measuring blood flow and correlating that to brain activity. My question is about resolution. FMRIs are our best tools in terms of brain activity when concerned about resolution. A stethoscope can indirectly tell you if you have fluid in your lungs, but "where" or "why" are far beyond the scope of a stethoscope. A direct comparison would be: stethoscope : is water in lungs? :: EEG : is brain in skull? One seems useful; the other, self-evident. So, EEG, is it /still/ confirmation bias in its ability to read/interpret signals in the brain? Or has there been an appreciable development in EEG's abilities/resolution/functionality?
- blobbers 5y agoA little surprising this isn't a kickstarter project partnered with Neurosky. I have a few of their headsets and I can never bring myself to get around to doing much with them. I should pull them out and give this a shot!
- snvzz 5y agoActually readable not dynamically loading archived version: https://archive.is/Axsy4 https://archive.is/Axsy4
- lucb1e 5y agoProtip: press the End key, then Home, and only then read the article to avoid everything moving and fading before your eyes the whole time. If it were an article with one or two pictures this would have been just a pet peeve, but here it's actively annoying because you are constantly scrolling and waiting for animations.