I was just looking at a hack of the starwars mind force trainer and it got me thinking. How feasible would it be to use the trainer to control the focal distance of a 3D camera. The camera could be mounted on a tilt and swivel base. You put on the head set and motion sensors on your head control the servos for the base unit to pint the camera, then viewing the camera through a set of VR glasses you use your power of your to control the focal length allowing you to focus on diffident objects. You would have to train it i guess and i have no idea were to by a suitable camera that would allow digital control of it's focal length. Some of it would be in the rage of the arduino i reckon. 'This images stuff would need a computer but the control hardware it doable think.
Any idea or know of interesting bit's that would help?
Well, the helmet thing only is doing what amounts to a very basic EEG.. it looks for theta (concentration, ostensibly) but doesn't give any more information than if the subject if concentrating.. there's no information to be gained to control focal length..
MAYBE you could have the focal length in motion and have it stop when the subject "pays the most attention", but it takes a second or two to stabilize at best in any case... your focal length tracking would be VERY slow...
In my opinion at best the starwars mind force trainer is very flaky but is probably nothing more than picking up muscle movement. It is not suited to fast control or in fact control of any kind, it is more wishful thinking than anything else.
focalist and mike cheers. Yes i know it wouldn't be all that good. but i thought there was 7 bauds of EEG to look at in there and the attention n thing. I wasn't expecting a toy to do a really good job really. You would have use some other concentration method i know it couldn't pick up your actual intention to focus. maybe an emotive might be better i don't know.