Week of 7/20/20-7/26/20

Last week, I noticed a problem that when trying to compare what was happening in-game to what was happening in the EEG, it would be very hard to make the two in-sync as they were recorded in separate recordings. My goal for this week was to find a way to show both the game and the EEG recording in one video.

In the end, I found that Streamlabs OBS provided a good solution to this problem. Streamlabs OBS is a popular live streaming and recording software that is used a lot among Youtubers and Twitch streamers. In Streamlabs, you can control what is shown on the screen and where it is shown. I took advantage of this to be able to position the game in the bottom left corner while the EEG would take up the whole screen. This way, there would be a good balance between clearly seeing what’s happening in the game without covering up too much of the EEG.

To test whether this would work or not, I went into the Apex Legends firing range while playing back an old recording in EmotivPRO. This way, it would be easy to test how much can be seen in-game while recording an EEG. The results of this can be seen in this video:

I think that this week’s work proved to be a success, and I’m looking forward to using Streamlabs more in the coming weeks.

Set Up and Tested the EPOC+ and EmotivPRO

Today I tested the EPOC+ headset with the EmotivPRO EEG recording software. After a few different attempts, I was able to set up the band with 83% contact quality, as shown in the image below.

After the setup, I decided to take a test recording using Magic: the Gathering Arena to make sure that the EEG would record properly while I was playing the game. To do this, I had EmotivPRO open on one of my monitors while I had the game open on the other, as demonstrated below.

After playing a few games while recording the EEG, I stopped the recording to make sure that the EEG recorded correctly, which it did. A small section of the recording is shown below.

About the Project

The goal of this project is to see if video-games from different genres cause brainwaves of different frequencies to be triggered. To do this, we will be comparing Apex Legends, a first-person-shooter game, with Magic: the Gathering Arena, a card game.  While the games are being played, an EEG will be recorded of the subject’s brainwaves so that we can see if there is a difference in frequencies.

Researcher: Zakariyya Scavotto

Mentor: Dr. Nathalia Peixoto