Call for Workshop Participation
BRAINPLAY ’07: PLAYING WITH YOUR BRAIN
Brain-Computer Interfaces and Games
Workshop on June 12th
in Salzburg, Austria
http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/brainplay07
held in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on
Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology
http://www.ace2007.org/
Aims and goals of the workshop
Advances in cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging
technologies provide us with the increasing ability to interface directly with
activity in the brain. Researchers have begun to use these technologies to
build brain-computer interfaces. In these interfaces, humans intentionally
manipulate their brain activity in order to directly control a com-puter or
physical prostheses. The ability to communicate and control devices with
thought alone has especially high impact for individuals with reduced
capabilities for muscular response. In fact, applications for patients with
severe motor disabilities have been the driving force of most brain-computer
interface research.
Although removing the need for motor movements in computer
interfaces is challeng-ing and rewarding, we believe that the full potential of
brain sensing technologies as an input mechanism lies in the extremely rich information
it could provide about the state of the user. Having access to this state
information is valuable to human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers and
opens up at least three distinct areas of research:
- direct control by thought, that is, inducing thoughts to
manipulate brain activ-ity that can be mapped onto game interaction commands
(e.g., move cursor, click buttons, control devices);
- determining the cognitive tasks in which the user is
involved in order to evaluate (game) interfaces or game environments;
- using cognitive or affective state of the user to
dynamically adapt the inter-face to the user (e.g., detect frustration or
engagement and provide tailored feedback).
Currently there is a development from traditional videogames
using keyboard, mouse or joystick to games that use all kinds of sensors and
algorithms that know about speech characteristics, about facial expressions,
gestures, location and identity of the gamer and even physiological processes
that can be used to adapt or control the game.
The next step in game development is input obtained from the
measurement of brain activity. User-controlled brain activity has been used in
games that involve moving a cursor on the screen or guiding the movements of an
avatar in a virtual environment by imagining these movements.
Relaxation games have been designed and also games that
adapt to the affective state of the user. BCI game research requires the
integration of theoretical research on mul-timodal interaction, intention
detection, affective state and visual attention monitoring, and on-line motion
control, but it also requires the design of several prototypes of games. These
may be games for amusement, but also (serious) games for educational, training
and simulation purposes.
We encourage participation from a wide range of disciplines
including Games & En-tertainment Computing, Cognitive Psychology,
Human-Computer Interaction, Affec-tive Computing, and Artificial
Intelligence/Machine Learning.
Submission
Prospective participants will submit a (position) paper
outlining their interest in this topic to anijholt@cs.utwente.nl. The position
paper should be in the conference format (ACM SIG format), which can be found
at http://www.ace2007.org/submissions.html. Recommended length of the position
paper is 2-4 pages. Apart from quality and rele-vance criteria, papers will
also be selected with the additional aim of having a bal-anced distribution
over the themes of the workshop. The workshop format will include a
presentation by each participant and discussion. We certainly welcome
presentations and demonstrations that can be considered as case studies and
experiments. At the end of the workshop we will discuss a possible publication
(special issue or book) devoted to the topics of this workshop.
Important dates:
- 30 March 2007: Submission of position papers
- 15 April 2007: Notification of acceptance
- 20 April 2007: End of early regestration
- June 12th, 2007: workshop
Publication
All position papers will be made available at http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/brainplay07
. The papers will be distributed during the workshop. During the workshop we
will discuss other possibilities for publication.
Workshop Co-Chairs:
Anton Nijholt, CTIT,
Desney Tan, Microsoft Research,
Workshop Programme Committee
Brendan Allison, UC
Peter Desain.
Robert Jacob,
Tan Le, Emotiv Systems Inc.,
Craig Lindley,
Peter Werkhoven, TNO,