Gillian Shaw
Sun
InteraXon CEO Ariel Garten demonstrates the levitating chair trick. The tech startup hopes an Olympic audience will help move it into the mainstream.
If you’re planning to be at the upcoming Vancouver Olympics, take time to stop at the Ontario pavilion and give a thought to tech startup InteraXon.
That thought could be about lighting up Niagara Falls. Or the CN Tower. Or Ottawa’s Parliament buildings.
Mind-controlled computing has come off the pages of sci-finovels into real life and Toronto-based InteraXon is at the Olympics with the hope that demonstrating the technology to a world audience will help move it into the mainstream.
InteraXon’s project Bright Ideas at the Ontario pavilion will mark the world’s largest thought-controlled computing experience.
“We really want to be advocates of this technology, to show people it is something that is real,” said Trevor Coleman, InteraXon’s chief operating officer. “When we tell people what we do — we control computers with our brains — they say ‘what?'”
“This kind of exposure with an international audience is going to show people that this is a real possibility.”
While the Olympic demonstration centres around controlling light shows at three Ontario landmarks, using thoughts to control computers is a technology that can be applied to everything from video games to levitating chairs. While the last sounds like something you might run into at a seance, InteraXon’s chair trick is done with a winch, which the computer — controlled by someone’s thoughts — delivers instructions to the electric device.
“Anything you can plug in we can control,” said Coleman.
At the demonstration, visitors will be able to try out the technology by putting on a headset with four electrodes to measure their brain activity. That output is converted into a digital signal that’s fed into a computer letting the visitors control light shows on Parliament Hill, at the CN Tower and at Niagara Falls.
The electroencephalograph (EEG) that measures brain activity doesn’t take specific orders. Rather it translates your grey matter’s overall pattern of activity, so when you focus, the lights get brighter. When you relax they dim.
“The brain is constantly emitting this broad spectrum of energy,” said Coleman.
Practice helps when it comes to manipulating your brainwave pattern but for newcomers, focusing and relaxing can create the control.
“It is actually alpha and beta waves, concentration and relaxation are easy shorthand,” said Coleman.
You tend to have elevated beta waves when you’re concentrating and elevated alpha waves when relaxed.
“You have to practise for a while,” said Coleman.
“One of the problems for the technology is that it is so new we don’t have any senses to tell us what our brain is doing.”
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