The Closest to Sword Art Online's Nerve Gear You Can Buy RIGHT NOW

so a few weeks ago i covered a new brain controlled interface that is becoming available for vr consumers to buy slap on your vr headset and supposedly be able to control all of your vr games with no controllers no movement just your brain well something like that actually already exists and is available for literally anyone to buy and i also said that if that video gets 10 000 likes i will personally buy one and test it out well uh we kind of smashed it so here we are i bought one and i've been using it for the past couple of weeks and now i'm here to show all of you just what brain controlled vr looks like right now in 2020. our are controllers dead or am i just brain dead let's find out roll the intro so welcome to virtually odd the series where i look at vr technology in hand either cutting edge retro or just odd because let's be real over the years vr has had some very odd devices and here's where i take a look out of them today we're looking at the luxury link a brain sensor that connects to a vr headset and uses signals from your brain to control things within games i think like a lot of people that are vr enthusiasts i look at something like sword art online and the nerve gear a completely immersive virtual reality brain interface that stimulates all of your senses and allows you to move around and act within the world using only your mind and it's very enticing and even though sword art online isn't the most pleasant of plot lines basically it being that you can't log out of the game or you die it still fascinates me and it's something that i want for vr not the dying part the immersive brain controlled part the benefits are that you don't have to worry about your play space size or uncomfortable headsets or wires or resolution it's all in your brain but what about this lucid link what is it and how does it work and how close does it come to something like a nerve gear well here it is i bought the pack for the htc vive which did require some dusting off of the headset but it is available for the vive pro and oculus rift the company making this is pretty interesting as well luke said link is a small south korean company that has developed this niche hardware solution and a software solution to go along with it for what seems to be a mainly commercial application but that doesn't stop anyone from just going to their website and buying one for themselves but it does cost 300 for what is essentially an eeg facial interface and a power pack to give you some perspective on how much 300 is worth in the vr industry you could buy an oculus quest 2 or a set of knuckle controllers or three vive trackers for full body tracking and here i am buying this maybe i shouldn't have made that deal in that video but nonetheless what you get in the box is the facial interface a hub power adapter and that's about it installation was stupid easy just replace the stock facial interface with the lucid link pop in the adapter plug in the usb and download some software that's required to interface with vr applications and we're ready to go but how does the lucid link actually work is it good will i be able to start playing vr games with my brain and only my brain only one way to find that out think startup okay so unfortunately since i'm guessing the luxity link is a commercial-based hardware package that is meant for specific use cases likely mostly medical there aren't any supported games or applications besides the ones that luxed link provides the main ones here being a game where you focus and build fireballs using your brain power to fight a dragon an app where you use your concentration to levitate a bunch of cubes in a room like you're using the force a meditation app and a brain monitoring app to see your brain waves throwing on the headset and link i'll try out the brainwave application first and this is actually one of the most interesting applications because i've honestly never had an opportunity to look at my brain activity in real time i was able to see my delta theta alpha beta and gamma waves in different channels and although i literally have no idea what any of this means or if it's just arbitrary data it's still cool to see especially when it's your own brain you're talking about another cool thing is that you get to see a live map of your brain activity as well as the activity on the left versus right side of your brain i don't know how accurate all of this information actually is but it's still a cool experience even if it only lasted for a few minutes before i was bored you'll notice another metric though relaxation and concentration and while that may seem cool this is pretty much where i started to lose some confidence in the link but i'll talk about that in just a second let's just get through a couple more apps the meditation app was uh um what's the word relaxing a soothing voice walks you through breathing exercises and focus all the while there's a meter showing your concentration or relaxation and while i'm not gonna lie meditation in vr is very relaxing and something i want to incorporate into my daily life but i don't know if this is it chief in the times where i felt the most relaxed the relaxation meter was showing that my brain was in red in terms of concentration then i'd almost panic a little looking at the meter and it would go back to relaxed which is the goal and that's when i was the most frantic and confused i think this is a terrible way to meditate and relying on a meter that feels arbitrary to guide your meditation seems like an unneeded component this whole meditation application is actually pretty good and relaxing if it didn't have a luxidlink component that is but next we're getting onto the actually exciting parts controlling things in vr with your brain first is a room where you can float blocks using your mind and concentration basically if the link sees your concentration is high enough through your brain activity the blocks float and if your brain activity is showing scattered activity or a relaxed state the blocks fall and right off the bat i was massively impressed it felt like when i focused on the blocks hard they would float imagine thinking blocks rise then watching the blocks actually rise it's a surreal feeling that i've never felt before in a game it's literally the most simple thing ever though it's a one or zero switch if concentration is high then blocks go up if concentration is low blocks don't go up but the menagerie quickly fell to the wayside i'd be focusing harder than i ever have focused before on one thing using every bit of my brain power that i had and it started feeling like the blocks were just kind of falling and rising arbitrarily then i started thinking what is concentration and relaxation what is the metric that is being tested here is it me focusing on one thing or subject or object or line or is it doing math or is it remembering what i ate a month ago what is the concentration that is being measured and what is relaxation is it a lack of brain activity or is it not thinking about anything or is it being sleepy without a clear definition of what i should be concentrating on or relaxing about it feels like this hardware is being purposefully vague latching onto the idea that this hardware knows more about you than you do blocks rise wow my brain must be amazing and i'm so focused blocks fall man i lost focus because the software told me i did in terms of these applications where the game actually reacts to your brain i feel like there's a certain amount of placebo effect if you're in a luxury link for a few minutes it's easy to be wowed and feel accomplished because you are the one that made those blocks rise but are you really and i didn't think so until i tried the final application and probably the one you're most excited about hearing of this is a game where there's a dragon and you have to throw fireballs at it but the catch is that you have to use your brain power to grow the fireball to deal more damage and my first go at it was pretty lackluster it uses the same system of concentration versus relaxation and the more you concentrate the larger the fireball grows it felt really awful to be honest the times i felt most relaxed was the time that the fireball actually grew and the times i was really trying to focus on the dragon or situation or the fireball was when the fireball didn't move at all it all felt i know i've said this 10 times but incredibly arbitrary and had me wondering again what is the concentration that you're actually looking for but then i tried a different approach and here's what it looked like that's orange that's orange that's orange instead of trying to focus or concentrate on one thing in my mind instead i let my mind kind of scatter and i focus on whatever was right in front of me that caught my eye for me that was literally thinking and yelling whatever color was right in front of me orange red blue whatever it was i just said the color that came to my mind first and focused on that and this worked better than anything else i did and kind of destroyed whatever idea i had about the lucid link and it being a pretty gimmicky device for actual input of course this could also be a sort of placebo but it did leave my experiences with the link at a kind of open-ended question i almost don't want to believe it but i feel like it kind of worked as intended and it was actually reading my brain activity to accomplish a task in game however i do think that we should look at this from a wider field of view this is not nerve gear as you can tell the luxor link is pretty cool but it's nothing more than an eeg and i know that while something like brain controlled vr can be exciting eeg technology just isn't capable right now providing actual legit control in vr one thing i noticed in every application besides the one that just reads your raw brain data is the actual input read from your brain that the game acts on is just so vague that it can be interpreted in so many ways and while you might be thinking one thing perhaps that's not what the luxity link is looking for and the vagueness certainly can lead you thinking you have control when you really don't and this all comes down to what the luxity link actually is and like i said earlier that's an eeg an eeg is a set of sensors that measure electrical signals from your brain in a non-intrusive manner then software like the luxed link sdk receives those signals denoises them and interprets them in whatever way luke's it seems most accurate while that may seem like it has a lot of potential eeg is nothing new and it's been around for about 100 years and while it is useful for some things like testing your brain activity versus a normal data set to see if that brain activity is normal or inhibited by something like a head injury or brain tumor it can't actually tell what the problem is and misdiagnosis via eeg has been a hot topic for decades now and eeg can't see precise brain data or actually what the problem is it can just see plain results and compare those to a larger data set of normal people or people that have been diagnosed with problems so yeah i expected more but i knew better because it's just an eeg concentration by lucid link's metrics is arbitrary and this isn't nerve gear something like the luxitlink or other eeg vr headset add-ons do have a place and it's mostly useful for medical applications and if you mix eeg with eye tracking or complex deep learning ai algorithms and a ton of other biometric data some actually pretty accurate readings can be made to do things in game nurable another eeg add-on company is a great example of that but i know that we're not at swordart online yet maybe if we get elon musk to bring neuralink to vr in the next couple decades we can be there and that's certainly a possibility and i cannot wait for the day to drop the controller forget the headset and play half-life alex 2 episode 2 with nothing but my brain but that's hopeful future thinking and if or when we do get there we will look back at these archaic devices like eeg vr sensors that cost a little too much and do a little too little and we'll think to ourselves wow that was pretty odd virtually odd that is [Music] i will be streaming today on twitch after this video so come in and say what's up also joining my discord server for the best vr community on the planet i want to thank all of my patreon supporters especially my omegas like benji fusion oak htg randon ronzarelli that brock eye token engineer tristan sloan true killer very evil shadow insomniac and i'm a cute fanboy you all literally made this video possible because i wouldn't be able to get things like this to test if it weren't for you don't forget to like this video if you loved it subscribe if you want more of this and hit that freaking bell if you just can't live without it much love thrill out [Music]

Channel: ThrillSeeker

Views: 1,721,547

Rating: 4.9515729 out of 5

Keywords: vr, virtual reality, ar, looxid link, htc vive, sword art online, Thrillseeker, virtually odd, valve index, oculus quest 2, brain controlled, Virtually Odd

Id: xAzdH4fFbxA

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020