BCI could make old two-player games even more fun: a proof of concept with "connect four"

• Authors: Emmanuel Maby;Margaux Perrin;Olivier Bertrand;Gaëtan Sanchez;Jérémie Mattout
• Venue: Advances in Human-Computer Interaction - Special issue on Using Brain Waves to Control Computers and Machines
• Year: 2012

We present a brain-computer interface (BCI) version of the famous "Connect Four". Target selection is based on brain event-related responses measured with nine EEG sensors. Two players compete against each other using their brain activity only. Importantly, we turned the general difficulty of producing a reliable BCI command into an advantage, by extending the game play and rules, in a way that adds fun to the game and might well prove to trigger up motivation in future studies. The principle of this new BCI is directly inspired from our own implementation of the classical P300 Speller (Maby et al. 2010, Perrin et al. 2011). We here establish a proof of principle that the same electrophysiological markers can be used to design an efficient two-player game. Experimental evaluation on two competing healthy subjects yielded an average accuracy of 82%, which is in line with our previous results on many participants and demonstrates that the BCI "Connect Four" can effectively be controlled. Interestingly, the duration of the game is not significantly affected by the usual slowness of BCI commands. This suggests that this kind of BCI games could be of interest to healthy players as well as to disabled people who cannot play with classical games.