SBIR Phase I: Using Brainwaves in Virtual Reality Applications

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to make virtual reality (VR) applications more intuitive and thereby increase their adoption of immersive technologies. The VR market was estimated to be $6.1 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $20.9 billion by 2025. This project addresses the VR developers’ challenge of creating interfaces that enable intuitive navigation.

As envisioned, the technology resulting from this project may enable developers to write user-friendly human interfaces for VR software by removing the current constraints posed by the need to master the domain of brainwaves. The project seeks to provide capabilities for deriving the user’s mental and emotional states, thus facilitating objective user feedback.

That new capability may impact other domains, including education and therapy. Acquiring capabilities to establish relationships between the mental and emotional states of the users and the VR and real-world environment stimuli could be developed and used to identify patterns that may answer important questions about human behavior and help people with limited mobility.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project advances the use of brainwaves to control VR environments. This project will develop techniques for inferring users’ decisions while navigating a VR environment and for deriving insights into users’ reactions to stimuli in real-world and VR environments. For this Phase I proof-of-concept work, these innovative techniques will be evaluated in jury consulting and game therapy scenarios.

The research addresses four technical hurdles: 1) inferring users’ decisions in virtual environments from brainwaves with reasonable accuracy, 2) deriving insights into users’ intellectual and emotional states as a result of exposure to stimuli, 3) designing an architecture for useable brainwaves-based applications, and 4) designing security and privacy solutions for this VR system.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.