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SSVEP Chess

University of Alberta students use NeuroPawn hardware to play chess by looking—via SSVEP.

SSVEP Chess

How SSVEP Works

SSVEP chess demo setup at natHACKS
Flashing stimuli used to control the SSVEP chess demo

SSVEP works by locking a user’s visual cortex to the frequency of a flashing stimulus. For example, if you were looking at a 10 hz stimulus, the neurons at the back of your head would turn on and off at 10 hz.

EEG signal capture from the back of the head during the SSVEP demo

Building the Demo

This group exploited this phenomenon by extracting EEG signals from the back of the head. They were able to process that signal using a fast-fourier transform to extract the component frequencies. They then used filter bank canonical correlation analysis to determine the synchrony of different channels.

Student playing chess using the SSVEP brain-computer interface

Using these techniques they were able to control a chess game just by looking at specific stimuli.

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