How a dancer with ALS used brainwaves to perform live | Hacker News Reader

How a dancer with ALS used brainwaves to perform live

electronicspecifier.com

57 points165944709112 comments

The featured video does not explain how it uses signals to produce which outcomes and they basically just say "we use machine learning while outputting a dance". At 07:10 it looks like the person chooses between two binary options of "sad" and "relieved". Unfortunately I doubt the person has anywhere near the real-time input to the performance as much as it is implied. Dentsu is also an advertisng agency in Japan, so it seems like this is more marketing than it is technical.

Dances by physical humans are always choreographed beforehand but live performances always show physical motion that can interrupt or change to unchoreographed movement at any time. I have a hard time believing that this person's brainwaves are mapping and producing the hologram in a specific 3D space, other than instructing it which mood preset to use at a given time.

Excluding the marketing of the ALS story, I guess I'm wondering how it's different from a Michael Jackson hologram performance where someone could adjust the sliders for mathematical functions live?

I am pretty sure you’re right, they are probably recording alpha waves, possibly combined with heart rate.

Decoding limb joint movements from EEG scalp recordings is basically an unsolved problem (we can barely do it in lab with implants), I doubt an advertising company has cracked it.

what do you mean by alpha waves , is there any good article ...

Alpha waves refer to the measurable 8-12Hz waves in the electromagnetic field coming out of the human head. They are the clearest "signal" we can read out with eeg ("electro" "encephalo" (brain) "graphy") and usually peak in power over the back of your head.

They are also by far the biggest (measurable) eeg signal change you can manipulate intentionally (other than motion artifacts). Closing your eyes or focusing your attention inwards reduce the power of those oscillations so much it's visible right away just looking with your eyes at the signal trace.

It would be very straightforward to program in decision points to the light show where someone can select an option by tuning their attention inwards or outwards.

TLDR: It's the "press X to doubt" of human-computer interfaces.

I understand the emotion,but this looks 50 percent FAKE(as a person doing self research on BCI), there is no way right now that a Non-invasive device can do this much thing in real time,

Their yt channel and editing style also confirm that .

but what ever happens I am optimistic about this tech and I thing this is gonna change people life one day for sure , but we have to wait till few years

Now is a really good time to contribute to https://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/ as far as EEG concerns go. There are a myriad of things that can be observed with EEG, and it would honestly be a decent thing to see grow in time.

There is quite a number of freely available EEG software for different paradigms (one such collection is MOABB - Mother of All BCI Benchmarks, and there’s a huge number of scientific articles).

The biggest bottleneck for a hobbyist is that when using EEG, most paradigms require somewhat expensive hardware to work and that most paradigms still don’t work well with scalp recordings outside a lab environment, even when using mid-cost devices.

There’s also the issue that classifiers usually have to be quite simple because datasets are small, because they are time consuming to record (and after you remove noisy epochs, you have even less data left). Cross-session and cross-subject learning rarely works, since EEG is dependent on so many factors like subjects’ brain anatomy, the type and precise location of electrodes, amount of gel (or lack thereof) and how dried out it is, mood and focus of the subjects, a huge number of environmental factors that influence subjects’ focus and many others.

The only paradigm I have seen to work a bit more reliably than others is Steady State Visual Potentials, because you have extra information that doesn’t need to be learned from EEG (the frequency of visual stimuli is roughly the same as the one in subjects’ occipital lobe).

what is "Steady State Visual Potentials". talk about it

I mean Steady State Visually Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state_visually_evoked_p...

I cannot dance anymore so I am useless. I am dead.

Those beliefs are the problem, not her ALS.

Creating attachments leads to this suffering. Do not be surprised if you suffer when they are taken away. Acceptance is the answer, not these fake and silly tech toys. Because guess what? She is still not dancing.

Creating attachments is also human, and shapes your sense of identity. In turn, your identity and sense of belonging makes you relate to other people and creates bonding, which we need as social animals.

Your stoic approach is valuable, but it’s a different mindset from most people and not something innate to humans.

So yes, her “beliefs” exacerbate the problem, but they are also entirely normal beliefs to have

> Your stoic approach is valuable, but it’s a different mindset from most people and not something innate to humans.

It is not an approach, it is an understanding. And it is not Stoicism, it is Buddhism.

>So yes, her “beliefs” exacerbate the problem, but they are also entirely normal beliefs to have

Just because they are normal beliefs, it does not make them healthy.

Understanding how suffering arises helps us when we lose our attachments. I am in no way saying do not from attachments, but to understand the suffering that is created when you form them.

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