SBIR Phase I: Using Brainwaves in Virtual Reality Applications

这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是使虚拟现实（VR）应用程序更加直观，从而增加他们对沉浸式技术的采用。据估计，VR市场在2020年将达到61亿美元，预计到2025年将达到209亿美元。该项目解决了VR开发人员在创建能够实现直观导航的界面方面的挑战。正如所设想的那样，该项目产生的技术可能使开发人员能够通过消除当前因需要掌握脑电波领域而造成的限制，为VR软件编写用户友好的人机界面。该项目旨在提供获取用户心理和情绪状态的能力，从而促进客观的用户反馈。这种新的能力可能会影响其他领域，包括教育和治疗。可以开发获取用户的精神和情感状态与VR和真实世界环境刺激之间的关系的能力，并用于识别可能回答有关人类行为的重要问题并帮助行动受限的人的模式。 这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目推进了脑电波控制VR环境的使用。该项目将开发用于在VR环境中导航时推断用户决策的技术，并深入了解用户对现实世界和VR环境中刺激的反应。对于第一阶段的概念验证工作，这些创新技术将在陪审团咨询和游戏治疗方案中进行评估。该研究解决了四个技术障碍：1）以合理的准确度从脑波推断用户在虚拟环境中的决策，2）作为暴露于刺激的结果导出对用户的智力和情感状态的洞察，3）设计用于可用的基于脑波的应用的体系结构，和4）的方法该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值进行评估，被认为值得支持和更广泛的影响审查标准。

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.