BCI and virtual collaboration

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are gaining increased importance in research and development. The use of these devices, however, is limited by the measurement noise and the conflicting constraints imposed by target environments. The solution to this problem could be to reproduce the application area without the interfering elements, instead of trying to integrate BCI devices directly into a suboptimal environment. Virtual Reality (VR) systems are capable of achieving these goals among many others, and in turn, BCI interfaces can serve to extend them as a new kind of natural input device. Thus, it can be argued that the integration of BCI and virtual collaboration can provide new synergies within CogInfoCom. In this paper, we discuss possiblities for such synergies by integrating a chosen BCI device (the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset) into a virtual collaboration system (VirCA). We investigate various ways in which BCI can be used to control processes in virtual collaboration, and provide conclusions on how to improve BCI interaction in future applications.