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SilasBarta comments on A Viable Alternative to Typing - Less Wrong
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I was considering setting up a brain-computer interface for typing. There are a lot of existing BCI hardware systems out there, and you could hook them into Dasher, a program for the disabled that makes it easy to point a mouse or finger at the keys they want to type, and makes likelier keys easier to hit.
Idea free for the stealing.
Still, keyboards are pretty effective (I use Pentadactyl to browse the web using just the keyboard), so I would think you could find a better keyboard somehow that could work for you.
Could you give an example/link? It never occurred to me that this might be something I could buy as of now.
The Emotiv epoc headset is pretty decent. I've worked with it at my university with a couple of BCI set ups, though I've not worked with their software, so I wouldn't know how good that is.
This is a device I got in December 2010, for IIRC $130. It detects tension ("grrr"), eye movement, and some other brain waves. In my experimentation with it, I found the brain wave modes hard to control, while the others were easier.
There was another model I saw that was $300, but I can't remember the name. The amazon page should get you started on finding related hardware.
Note: I haven't actually used a BCI with Dasher, it was just an idea I had for hands-free typing (and possible improvements in costs over existing tools for the disabled).
Both speed and accuracy of brain-computer interface for typing are pretty bad. What your motivation for using it?
I was exploring it
a) as a possible alternative (and very cheap) typing mechanism for the disabled that hadn't been tried before, and
b) because I figured I could improve on it to the point of making brain-typing competitive, or at least make BCI competitive with mouse usage.
Brain-computer interfaces for the disabled have been tried. There's plenty of academic work on the topic. For some people who are completely paralyzed the technology allows them to communicate by typing 1 character per second.
Right, I found that information at the time, but wasn't convinced this was the best achievable performance for such individuals (let alone price-performance), considering what should be possible with consumer-grade BCIs + Dasher.
I still can't convince myself that this is the best they can do. Personal project time?
I think the 1 character per second speed is even done with EEGs that are much better than consumer grade equipment.
It could be possible to do better but it probably won't be easy.
Sure, but I don't think EEG quality (in terms of lab vs. consumer grade) is the real bottleneck; I think it's minimizing the amount of input that must be provided at all by exploiting the regularity of the input that will be provided. The techniques available here may have been overlooked.
I played a bit with Emotiv and find a maximum of one character-per-second pretty believable - at least, if you stick to actual brain signals and not signals from face muscles ( and even with face muscles one character per second seems in the right ballpark).
One character is not the same as one byte of (maximally compressed) information. The whole point of programs like Dasher (and word suggestion features in general) is to take advantage of the low entropy of text data relative to its uncompressed representation. Characteristic screenshot
Were you using a static, non-adaptive, on-screen keyboard? If so, that's why I would think connecting it to Dasher should result in a speed greater than one char per second, at least after the training period (both human training, and character-probability-distribution training).
If someone is looking for something like Pentadactyl but for Chrome, I recommend Vimium. It adds tons of keyboard shortcuts that make keyboard-based browsing awesome.