EEG Cat Ears (2018)

https://i2nk.co/mindwave-cat-ears

by monstermachine • 4 years ago

340 63 4 years ago

i2nk.co

mysterydip• 4 years ago

Really extensive write-up, very informative.

phnofive• 4 years ago

(2018)

Hoping for a v2 but couldn't find one.

actionfromafar• 4 years ago

Very cool! This triggered another idea - our ears already can move a slight bit by its own muscles. Can't we read these muscle movements, and amplify them by controlling the servo Cat Ears in sync? Might be easier to learn to control, maybe.

gambiting3• 4 years ago

>our ears already can move a slight bit by its own muscles.

Not everyone can do that though. My wife can easily twitch her ears by just thinking about it, I cannot no matter how hard I try - it's just like there is no nerve link to whatever is there.

praptak4• 4 years ago

I only discovered how to move my ears when I was like 8 years old. This suggests the nerves are there, just very non-obvious to control.

goodpoint2• 4 years ago

The nerves are there. You "just" need to discover them.

amelius• 4 years ago

Probably similar to how tongue rolling is genenic.

yoz-y2• 4 years ago

It would be a better control mechanism. NeuroSky (the headset used here) is only good as an eye blink detector and even at that it’s not great. EEG reading on the forehead, without gel is always really bad because there are no obviously interpretable signals (frontal cortex is way more complex than, say motor regions or the occipital nerve), the skin is tougher due to no hair, and is way too much muscle interference.

Something with two electrodes behind ears (or wherever the muscles responsible for moving ears are) could be even used as a tool to train to move your (human) ears.

musingsole• 4 years ago

The Muse 2 headset has ear and forehead sensors. I'm not too up on EEG, but I'd believed the ear sensors were just for grounding/baselining what's read from the forehead.

Blink detection at least is pretty robust when I've played with it.

https://choosemuse.com/muse-2/

anfractuosity• 4 years ago

I saw something where someone tried to do that - https://hackaday.com/2020/01/02/assistive-technolgy-switch-i...

It seems to use a type of camera to measure movement in the ear.

JKCalhoun• 4 years ago

I was thinking perhaps add a pair of microphones to the headset and have the ears react to loud sounds — attempt to angle towards the source of the loud sound.

Mux that in with the neural input.

nonrandomstring• 4 years ago

I sat behind a girl at school whose ears would involuntarily move. Like quite a _lot_! Like a dog. It freaked everyone right out.

sleightofmind• 4 years ago

The daughter of a friend of mine (just a grade-school-aged child at the time) demonstrated for me how she could hold one eye completely fixed (staring straight ahead) and move the other eye independently, turning it outwards as far as she could had she been moving both eyes. The motion of the eye being moved was very smooth and deliberate. I found it absolutely fascinating and baffling. How does one even discover they have such an ability?

caycep2• 4 years ago

honestly, looking at the devices and not seeing the EEG traces, I half suspect that a lot of the input is already muscle artifact. Even w/ dedicated medical EEG w/ the fancy electrodes and conducting goop, it's plagued w/ a ton of eyelid/scalp muscle artifact.

twobitshifter• 4 years ago

Or even if you don't use the muscles, is there a way to build something that isn't a noisy servo.

Nursie• 4 years ago

Awesome project!

We had some neko-mimi's a few years ago but the ear clip broke very quickly.

sebastianvoelkl• 4 years ago

There was a really old version of this already 9 years ago* *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP8kVEvm6h8

resonious• 4 years ago

Those exact ears were reference material for this project.

I began by looking at the youtube concept video for the necomimi brainwave-controlled ears. My intent wasn't to copy their implementation, but I was curious what kind of motion they had decided on.

snarfy• 4 years ago

Neat. I bought a pair at PAX many years ago. Sadly they stopped working after a week or so.

LoveMortuus• 4 years ago

The ones that you linked are called Necomimi, I bought them and they still work. The one thing that they should really improve is the quality of the motors because they are extremely loud which kind of defeats the point of having a mode which shows you your meditation state and relaxed state. I wish someone would make an update and improved version. Another thing that bothered me is that it needs FOUR AAA batteries, which is good from the environment point of view. But very bulky and kinda annoying from the UX point of view.

The same company also made a tail, but I didn't have a chance to test it nor did I buy it.

svnpenn• 4 years ago

Site does not work at all without JavaScript, I just get a completely white page.

jd24• 4 years ago

Yeah, because the guy is animating in every image for some reason

easrng• 4 years ago

She's not a guy.

Mashimo• 4 years ago

Dang, that 3D printer needs some calibrating :D The first layer looks horrible (Or it's very old)

pilotneko• 4 years ago

It’s a Makerbot cupcake, which is pretty old by this point (~10 years). One of the first “affordable“ 3D printers.

https://makerbot.fandom.com/wiki/Cupcake

KaiserPro• 4 years ago

I do love a good write up. The concept and execution is great, but what's most important is that they have shared the journey.

alexpotato• 4 years ago

I was really impressed with the sketches. I always thought those were more of an engineering "suggested best practice" but this is a good reminder that a visual sketch can act as a reference while also showing how pieces might fit together.

gg2222• 4 years ago

Here is a fun demonstration of the Necomimi cat ears that were noted as reference material for the project.

https://youtu.be/fOrqZjvQ0JQ?t=527

Amazing work building your own btw!

Animats• 4 years ago

Yes, it's a Necomimi clone. The big year for those was 2012. They detect three mental states - idle/relaxed, attentive, and surprised. I saw a group of cosplay girls wearing them at a convention. Someone called out the name of one of the girls. Her ears, and not the ears of the others, popped up. A review reported someone playing a video game had their ears in the "attentive" position while playing a level, and the ears would droop between levels.

Good idea, but too bulky. It needed cosplay big hair to hide the machinery. The big head-mounted box is mostly the 4 AAA batteries. If someone revives this, the mechanism needs to be about half the size and better fitted to a head.

The Nekomimi people also came out with a powered cat tail, but that was a total flop.

TruthWillHurt• 4 years ago

Nice project, but obviously from the single electrode and its placement, the only EEG signal you'll get is eye-movement artifacts...

writegit2• 4 years ago

Super cool project and write up.

What's the state of EEG these days?

Last I interacted with one of these systems it seemed more like confimation bias from noise.

Had a buddy who bought a "high end" headset, shaved his head to "improve the signal", and it appeared for all intents and purposes that it was mostly only reading concusive activity. He would "show me it's working" by tapping on the exterior of the sensors to get it to display a spike.

Conceptually these systems "make sense" to me, ie. the brain uses electromagnetism to function so one should be able to sense/manipulate those vectors, but an FMRI is MASSIVE and requires a 1-3 Tesla electromagnet to get its fidelity, and even then is only measuring blood flow and correlating that to brain activity.

So what's the hope that a tiny sensor resting on your skin will actually correspond to anything happening inside the brain?

SkittyDog2• 4 years ago

EEG and MRI are based on two completely different physical measurements. They have nothing whatsoever to do with each otyer, in terms of why they work. Medical EEG machines are very small, and their size relative to MRI machines does not factor into how effective the EEG is.

I mean, would you doubt that a stethescope can work, because it's so much smaller than an MRI? No, that would be ridculous. Same with your comparison vs EEGs.

Just read the WP articles on MRIs and EEGs. You'll understand it.

writegit2• 4 years ago

Is this written from the perspective of experience with contemporary EEG systems or wiki reading?

They have nothing whatsoever to do with each otyer, in terms of why they work.

I thought my comment made my knowledge of this explicit? Also I was referring to FMRI.

> and even then is only measuring blood flow and correlating that to brain activity.

My question is about resolution. FMRIs are our best tools in terms of brain activity when concerned about resolution.

A stethoscope can indirectly tell you if you have fluid in your lungs, but "where" or "why" are far beyond the scope of a stethoscope.

A direct comparison would be:

    stethoscope : is water in lungs? :: EEG : is brain in skull?

One seems useful; the other, self-evident.

So, EEG, is it /still/ confirmation bias in its ability to read/interpret signals in the brain?

Or has there been an appreciable development in EEG's abilities/resolution/functionality?

ravi-delia• 4 years ago

EEG studies are rife with issues, but there are a number of very well replicated results. Obviously they do nothing to localize an effect, but there are absolutely clear correspondences between the readings of an EEG and at least some cognitive activity.

Will you get that nice FMRI resolution? Absolutely not. But the effects you do get are fascinating, and super weird.

Now that's the EEG I've seen in labs. Not sure if there is a similarly good commercial offering.

caycep2• 4 years ago

the underlying concept of EEG hasn't changed since the initial ones in 1929. Basically just electrodes trying to detect whatever LFP (aggregate electrical potentials) comes across the cranium. The clinical ones are considered a rough gauge of brain activity, good enough to reliably detect large seizures or a generalized slowing in patients who are delirious but that is about it.

There's MEG which tries to do the same thing but using magnetic detectors instead of scalp electrodes, but those systems are large and unwieldy

In surgery, they do intracranial subdural electrodes which give you better cortical LFP because the electrodes are almost directly on top of the brain and not having to measure through bone.

Then there are the single unit electrodes or things like the Black Rock systems Utah array where thin probes penetrate the brain into deeper structures but obviously have much more special circumstances where they are able to be used.

pedalpete• 4 years ago

We're building an eeg device for sleep, and work with a colleague who is on the Emotiv team, so I've got a bit of experience.

The state of BCI is improving, but one of the challenges is for many of the things we'd want to do, you need electrodes placed in areas that have hair. There are flexible sensors that can find their way through hair, but as somebody with thick curly hair, they are not fit for everyone yet. Then there is movement that also needs to be considered for many of these devices.

This is why something like Muse headband used for meditation is a good starting point. You are placing the electrodes on areas that don't have hair, and the use case is while being still, so you have consistent contact without movement.

At my start-up (https://soundmind.co) we're using forehead mounted electrodes which measure your brain waves during sleep, and we use sound to improve sleep performance. So like Muse (which you can also use during sleep, but does not yet provide stim), we benefit from measuring very small signals when you are mostly still.

I think if we were walking down the street with our headband trying to control cat ears, you'd get lots of EEG artifacts due to movement of the electrodes.

My 2 cents.

blobbers• 4 years ago

A little surprising this isn't a kickstarter project partnered with Neurosky.

I have a few of their headsets and I can never bring myself to get around to doing much with them.

I should pull them out and give this a shot!

dmitrygr• 4 years ago

Bought a similar thing a decade ago: https://www.necomimi.com/

snvzz• 4 years ago

Actually readable not dynamically loading archived version:

https://archive.is/Axsy4

lucb1e• 4 years ago

Protip: press the End key, then Home, and only then read the article to avoid everything moving and fading before your eyes the whole time. If it were an article with one or two pictures this would have been just a pet peeve, but here it's actively annoying because you are constantly scrolling and waiting for animations.

EEG Cat Ears (2018)

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