Watch: VRChat users your brainCreate a system to control avatar movements using . Here’s how!
What you see above (at least on the surface) is a VRChat furry dog waving its ears.
But the point is: the real life of the avatar is LantisMeanwhile… with his heart.
to the letter:
“To control my ears, I think of it as a number floating along a slider and adjusting the intensity,” Rantis explains. “Imagine having two faders on your DJ deck and controlling them to focus the output by increasing or decreasing the intensity.”
This is just one of the amazing user-created VRChat innovations I recently discovered. chill out charles in-world has been building headband software that senses brains in virtual worlds for two years.
“The use case I hear the most is that it helps self-expression for people on the autism spectrum. That’s interesting,” Charles said. “I just thought of self-expression as a communication thing I wanted to improve for fun. Even in the original use case I set out, I never realized there was any real benefit to this.”
As for how this works – you can try it yourself:
“Each time a neuron fires, it emits a small voltage difference, and there are a lot of them,” explains Charles. “Electrodes on the headband can detect the sum of voltage differences and obtain the firing rate of the neuron. These firing rates correspond to brain states, from which you can obtain concentration and relaxation scores, which are then transmitted to vrchat via an open sound control protocol. It’s typically used at music concerts to transfer data to lights and effects, but VRChat uses it as a way to transfer data between third-party applications.”
If you want to run it yourself, I recommend purchasing the Muse MU-01, a headband that costs about $200 or less. The software itself is available on Charles’ GitHub.
“My code sits on top of the Brainflow library, which supports a wide range of consumer EEG headbands. Convenient to use and suitable for most VR headsets. All you need is a Bluetooth LE adapter. “Then it’s up to the user to creatively use animation to represent those (EEG) readings.”
He has a safety warning for vulnerable users.
“With this approach, you’ll be bending your brain to move limbs that don’t exist. Things like fatigue and worsening of existing mental disorders. The good news is that these risks don’t happen often. “However, this is something to be cautious about, especially when reconstructing neural pathways outside of a medical setting.”
In my favorite scene avalanche, a severely disabled man can control his avatar in the metaverse through an interface like this. And VRChat’s user community continues to realize the full potential of the Metaverse through projects like this.