Connectionists: Call for Position Papers: Playing with your Brain

[Mannes Poel]

Call for Position Papers and Workshop Participation

BRAINPLAY ’07: PLAYING WITH YOUR BRAIN

Brain-Computer Interfaces and Games


Workshop on June 12th in Salzburg, Austria
http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/brainplay07

held in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on Advances in 
Computer Entertainment Technology
http://www.ace2007.org/



Aims and goals of the workshop

Advances in cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging technologies 
provide us with the increasing ability to interface directly with 
activity in the brain. Researchers have begun to use these technologies 
to build brain-computer interfaces. In these interfaces, humans 
intentionally manipulate their brain activity in order to directly 
control a com-puter or physical prostheses. The ability to communicate 
and control devices with thought alone has especially high impact for 
individuals with reduced capabilities for muscular response. In fact, 
applications for patients with severe motor disabilities have been the 
driving force of most brain-computer interface research.

Although removing the need for motor movements in computer interfaces is 
challenging and rewarding, we believe that the full potential of brain 
sensing technologies as an input mechanism lies in the extremely rich 
information it could provide about the state of the user. Having access 
to this state information is valuable to human-computer interaction 
(HCI) researchers and opens up at least three distinct areas of research:



- direct control by thought, that is, inducing thoughts to manipulate 
brain activity that can be mapped onto game interaction commands (e.g., 
move cursor, click buttons, control devices);

- determining the cognitive tasks in which the user is involved in order 
to evaluate (game) interfaces or game environments;

- using cognitive or affective state of the user to dynamically adapt 
the inter-face to the user (e.g., detect frustration or engagement and 
provide tailored feedback).



Currently there is a development from traditional videogames using 
keyboard, mouse or joystick to games that use all kinds of sensors and 
algorithms that know about speech characteristics, about facial 
expressions, gestures, location and identity of the gamer and even 
physiological processes that can be used to adapt or control the game.

The next step in game development is input obtained from the measurement 
of brain activity. User-controlled brain activity has been used in games 
that involve moving a cursor on the screen or guiding the movements of 
an avatar in a virtual environment by imagining these movements.

Relaxation games have been designed and also games that adapt to the 
affective state of the user. BCI game research requires the integration 
of theoretical research on mul-timodal interaction, intention detection, 
affective state and visual attention monitoring, and on-line motion 
control, but it also requires the design of several prototypes of games. 
These may be games for amusement, but also (serious) games for 
educational, training and simulation purposes.



We encourage participation from a wide range of disciplines including 
Games & En-tertainment Computing, Cognitive Psychology, Human-Computer 
Interaction, Affec-tive Computing, and Artificial Intelligence/Machine 
Learning.



Submission

Prospective participants will submit a (position) paper outlining their 
interest in this topic to anijholt at cs.utwente.nl. The position paper 
should be in the conference format (ACM SIG format), which can be found 
at http://www.ace2007.org/submissions.html. Recommended length of the 
position paper is 2-4 pages. Apart from quality and rele-vance criteria, 
papers will also be selected with the additional aim of having a 
bal-anced distribution over the themes of the workshop. The workshop 
format will include a presentation by each participant and discussion. 
We certainly welcome presentations and demonstrations that can be 
considered as case studies and experiments. At the end of the workshop 
we will discuss a possible publication (special issue or book) devoted 
to the topics of this workshop.



Important dates:

- 30 March 2007: Submission of position papers

- 15 April 2007: Notification of acceptance

- 20 April 2007: End of early regestration

- June 12th, 2007: workshop



Publication

All position papers will be made available at 
http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/brainplay07  . The papers will be distributed 
during the workshop. During the workshop we will discuss other 
possibilities for publication.



Workshop Co-Chairs:

Anton Nijholt, CTIT, University of Twente, the Netherlands, 
anijholt at cs.utwente.nl

Desney Tan, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA



Workshop Programme Committee

Brendan Allison, UC San Diego, USA

Peter Desain, University of Nijmegen, Netherlands

Alan Dix, Lancaster University, UK

Robert Jacob, Tufts University, Medford, USA

Tan Le, Emotiv Systems Inc., San Francisco, USA

Craig Lindley, Gotland University, Sweden

Peter Werkhoven, TNO, Soesterberg, Netherlands