Hacker News Reader

Comment by kodachi | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, thanks for the tip. Have you tried one of those to decide not to buy them? The 'open' in their name is encouraging. How far are we to train some sort of assistant that executes commands based on brain activity patterns, e.g. instead of shouting '<assitant-name> turn off the music', just think it and have it executed?

View on HN

I've used OpenBCI before, it's pretty good - noise filtering was the hardest part, which isn't really that bad of a problem to have. Here's a paper showing how to read eye movements with it: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1109/ICORR.2017.8009392

The Muse (https://choosemuse.com/) is much more of a consumer-friendly device, and it was super easy to get working at a hackathon years ago, but it looks like they suspended access to their SDK.

No, don't buy anything from Muse. Those devices are awful and the firm works (worked?) hard to reduce visibility on the problems for example in their developer forums, instead of working to address the problems. I owned multiple device versions from the Kickstarter forward and they were all universally finicky and shit. The one redeeming feature were the (patented) sensor pads, which can work better than more "traditional" sensor pads. But they dry out and get gross pretty quickly, and also are easily damaged, and it felt like the Muse people really wanted deep down to be in the business of supplying people with fresh new sensor pads like -- badum-psh! -- some kind of subscription. Interestingly, I also used one from a maker event, and it definitely seemed like they had picked the cream of the crop in order to market them better. But the production units were terrible!

Can you confirm that you are bashing the right company? There is nothing on a Muse that I can imagine fits the description of a sensor pad that could wear out. I have two devices and they work fine -- but EEG is itself a major challenges and dry electrode even more so.b

Oh jeez what the hell, you're right. I was thinking about Emotiv! Well it'd be nice if I could unfuck this situation, as I also got a Muse through Indiegogo and even though I gave it to a friend some years ago, it did what it said on the tin.

The muse has a solid metal strip. Are you thinking of a different company?

Yes, you're totally right, and I am totally wrong. I was thinking about my Emotiv headsets and not the Muse!

Yeah, I've written off using emotiv for anything because they keep all your data, and can do what they want for it, and rent it out to you. Muse, OpenBCI and OpenEEG all the way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com