NeuroTetris

Have you ever played Tetris? What if I told you, that you could play with your mind? It just takes focus. The more focused you are the faster you can move the blocks in place.

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Inspiration

The inspiration to create NeuroTetris was to create a fun and user-friendly application to investigate focus levels. Users arrange blocks and are able to do it more effectively and faster if they remain focused.

What it does

NeuroTetris was designed to be a brain controlled virtual Tetris game. The speed at which an individual is able to place blocks in their correct orientation depends on how focused they are. Previous knowledge of the ratio between alpha and beta's role in focus was utilized in determining how focus or unfocused an individual was while playing the game.

How we built it

NeuroTetris was built using Unity and OpenBCI's Ganglion board. We were able to collect live EEG recordings from four Channels. EEG recordings were filtered using a notch filter removing 60hz electrical noise and passed through a bandpass filter to derive Alpha and Beta brainwaves. The filtered brainwaves were transformed using signal processing algorithm(Fast Fourier transform). An individual's focus level was measured using the Alpha/Beta ratio. When the threshold of the focus level is crossed, the speed at which the Tetris blocks fall down increases. When Tetris blocks reach the ground, the LED in the Arduino lights up.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran to was the integration of Unity and brain flow. We were not aware that unity only accepted C# and much of our original code for getting the focus level from the BCI was in python.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully gathered EEG recordings from OpenBCI, and created a Tetris game through Unity 3D, and integrated with Arduino.

What we learned

Gained experience working with OpenBCI, Unity, Arduino, GitHub and Brainflow. We learned that we need to prioritize, and set reasonable timelines.

What's next for NeuroTetris

In the future, we hope to incorporate more features into our game, and fix existing issues. We would like to add visual controls, for example use artifacts like eye blinks to change the color of the block, and pausing the game when both eyes are closed. We would also like to use this to push further research on brain focus levels, getting more participants from different demographics.

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