Enjoy driving from thought in a virtual city

Virtual reality (VR) technology allows users to communicate or interact with a virtual artifact in an immersive simulated environment. Most of the existing virtual reality platform uses standard input devices such as a keyboard and mouse, or through multimodal devices such as a wired glove. In this paper, a novel electroencephalo-graph (EEG) based virtual driving (EEG-VD) prototype is proposed, investigated, and designed. Users can enjoy driving a virtual car in a simulated and realistic city only through brain signals. User's EEG signals are obtained, analyzed, and recognized into control commands, which are used to control a virtual car in a three-dimensional (3D) city environment. The paradigm display of P300 in the proposed EEG-VD system is embedded in the display of VR, to realize closely combination of VR and P300. This guarantees the verisimilitude of the system. In addition, asynchronous BCI paradigm based on P300 signals used in the proposed EEG-VD system realizes a high degree of freedom, which can offer appropriate number of control instructions. In order to verify the effectiveness and performance of the designed EEG-VD system, eight volunteers are asked to drive the car in the 3D city. The experiment result shows that the accuracy of P300 recognition rate is larger than 90%. Most of the users (62.5%) can drive the car without any collisions in the first virtual environment, and all users can drive the car without any collisions in the second virtual environment. The designed system can not only be used as a tool to train a subject of BCI but also be used as a game for enjoying life. Potentially, the system can promote the research of BCI applications.