Paper Reading #26: Embodiment in Brain-Computer Interaction

Paper Reading #24: Gesture avatar: a technique for operating mobile user interfaces using gestures

References

Kenton O'Hara, Abigail Sellen, Richard Harper.  "Embodiment in Brain-Computer Interaction". UIST '11 Proceedings of the 23rd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology.  ACM New York, NY, USA ©2011.

 Author Bios

Kenton O'Hara is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research.

Abigail Sellen is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. She received her Ph. D. from the University of California San Diego.

Richard Harper is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. He received his Ph. D. from Manchester.

Summary 

• Hypothesis -The researchers hypothesized that in brain-computer interaction, the whole body and social interactions are equally important for study.
• Method - The study used a game called MindFlex. Three groups were given the game to take home and video themselves playing it. They were encouraged to bring in random people such as outside family and friends to play as well. They were told to choose where and when to play, allowing for a natural environment.
• Results - The analysis showed many different things that was not necessary for impacting the game. For example, body position played a large role in how users interacted with the game, although it had no direct effect. Another is that users would frequently use imaging, such as imagining or telling the ball to go up when all they needed to do was concentrate more.
• Content - The researchers analyzed the interactions between players and between player and game in order to better understand how brain-computer interaction works. They told different groups to play the game while acting naturally, in order to get a representation that was as little skewed as possible. They observed many common patterns between players.

 Discussion

I thought that the game itself was interesting, but found that the paper didn't seem to hold much application. It more or less was saying that we need to study brain-computer interaction more in order to expand the field, which seems to me pretty obvious. However, the paper was well done and I enjoyed the experiment itself. Some of the observations they found were surprising to me. I would like to play that game, as I'm not sure I would do very well; unlike some people, I can't ever stop thinking and can't "turn my brain off".