Controlling an avatar with your brain

Dr. Doron Friedman, head of the Advanced Virtuality Lab (AVL) at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel, has been studying and experimenting with human-computer interfaces and their impact on individuals and society for the last three years.

 The AVL’s main activity is to build virtual worlds and the interfaces that could be used in the future to investigate human behavior and the human mind in a virtual reality setting.

One of its projects, is called VERE (Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-embodiment). The team uses a brain scanner to control a computer application interactively in real time. This innovation could potentially have a dramatic impact on communication with severely disabled patients. For example, they could control avatars just by thinking about them and activating the correct areas in the brain. People still prefer a real face-to-face meetings. And this technology gives the user an opportunity to be in a meeting without physical presence. The virtual character will not only look like you, but behave in the same way that you would, limited only by today’s artificial intelligence capabilities.

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