SBIR Phase I: Using Brainwaves in Virtual Reality Applications

SBIR 第一阶段：在虚拟现实应用中使用脑电波

• 批准号: 2110883
• 负责人: Lotfi Ben Othmane
• 金额: $ 25.6万
• 依托单位: BRAINSOFT, LLC
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-04-01 至 2023-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2110883&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Using; Brainwaves; Virtual

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to make virtual reality (VR) applications more intuitive and thereby increase their adoption of immersive technologies. The VR market was estimated to be $6.1 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $20.9 billion by 2025. This project addresses the VR developers’ challenge of creating interfaces that enable intuitive navigation. As envisioned, the technology resulting from this project may enable developers to write user-friendly human interfaces for VR software by removing the current constraints posed by the need to master the domain of brainwaves. The project seeks to provide capabilities for deriving the user’s mental and emotional states, thus facilitating objective user feedback. That new capability may impact other domains, including education and therapy. Acquiring capabilities to establish relationships between the mental and emotional states of the users and the VR and real-world environment stimuli could be developed and used to identify patterns that may answer important questions about human behavior and help people with limited mobility. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project advances the use of brainwaves to control VR environments. This project will develop techniques for inferring users’ decisions while navigating a VR environment and for deriving insights into users’ reactions to stimuli in real-world and VR environments. For this Phase I proof-of-concept work, these innovative techniques will be evaluated in jury consulting and game therapy scenarios. The research addresses four technical hurdles: 1) inferring users’ decisions in virtual environments from brainwaves with reasonable accuracy, 2) deriving insights into users’ intellectual and emotional states as a result of exposure to stimuli, 3) designing an architecture for useable brainwaves-based applications, and 4) designing security and privacy solutions for this VR system.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是使虚拟现实(VR)应用更加直观，从而增加其对沉浸式技术的采用。预计2020年VR市场规模为61亿美元，预计到2025年将达到209亿美元。该项目解决了虚拟现实开发人员的挑战，即创建支持直观导航的界面。正如设想的那样，该项目产生的技术可以通过消除当前需要掌握脑电波领域所带来的限制，使开发人员能够为VR软件编写用户友好的人机界面。该项目寻求提供得出用户的精神和情绪状态的能力，从而促进客观的用户反馈。这一新能力可能会影响其他领域，包括教育和治疗。获得在用户的精神和情感状态与VR和真实世界环境刺激之间建立关系的能力可以被开发并用于识别模式，这些模式可能会回答有关人类行为的重要问题，并帮助行动不便的人。这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目推动了使用脑电波来控制VR环境。该项目将开发一种技术，用于在虚拟现实环境中导航时推断用户的决定，并深入了解用户在现实世界和虚拟现实环境中对刺激的反应。对于这个第一阶段的概念验证工作，这些创新的技术将在陪审团咨询和游戏治疗场景中进行评估。这项研究解决了四个技术障碍：1)以合理的精度从脑波推断用户在虚拟环境中的决策；2)洞察用户暴露在刺激下的智力和情绪状态；3)设计基于脑波的可用应用程序的架构；4)为该VR系统设计安全和隐私解决方案。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。