have you ever wanted to play video games with your mind or upgrade your hand with an extra thumb these are the brilliant innovations changing how we experience the world this streamer has found a way to play games with her mind finding success in games like elden ring halo and trackmania all without the use of a controller and the best part it's not just perrie that can do it mind control gaming gaming is exactly as it sounds it is gaming with your mind so in my case i have an eeg that picks up my brain activity and then i've just translated that into pushing buttons on a virtual controller an eeg or an electroencephalogram which i had to spend a few weeks practicing how to say is a bunch of electrodes that go on your scalp and it picks up the electromagnetic brain activity that comes from your head it can look and see what kind of activity is going on and if i've trained it to recognize what this means then it can look and see if you're doing that for instance imagining something coming towards you could make the character attack in game something lifting dodge something sinking in water heal i can move the character by tilting my head the kind of things that you should say to me to get some brain activity are anything that would elicit a really strong emotion the best one that i've seen so far is fear and shock so when i'm playing horror games it lights up if there's a jump scare okay fear so i'm embarrassed that that worked that's not good that's a bad sign that's a bad bad sign bogey i'm running oh dear oh oh okay right now i'm really really into games like anything that's dark fantasy rpg like souls like games games that are really difficult and punishing because i think maybe that's just part of my it took me about six months to make it work the first time just to make it push a button in the game and right now i'm on ten months into the project and it's still not perfect i may have missed the turn the main obstacle though wasn't building the controller or doing the coding the main obstacle was getting the mental commands to work so actually thinking of what i should be visualizing to record and i had to train them up for for about i think in total we're on six hundred hours of doing the same pattern over and over again and telling the software what to remember and that's just of the visualizations i have now so there were loads of other iterations that didn't work because they were too similar to each other or they just didn't make any sense or there was one where i was imagining pulling something down from the sky and then i realized about three hours into doing it that that's not gonna work because then i'm not looking at the monitor i'm not looking at the game but my first moment where i thought there's no way this is possible i can't believe that this is happening this must be a fluke this must be a mistake was the first time that it worked so i was running around with the character steve in minecraft and it was the first ever visualization it was pushing a block forward and i wanted him to swing his fist in mine and then i did it and then he did it and it was just the wildest thing i was absolutely blown away and i thought this is such a far out idea based on something that i've never tried before and as far as i'm aware very few people have and it worked and i had to do it over and over again not to test it not to make sure not to get it better but just to believe that that was actually me doing it and not some random wild error i felt absolutely mind blown i guess part of the plan are you ready to have your mind blown no let's try this let's calibrate this bad boy so you're literally gonna visualize something you see is heavy it can be the cube that you see on screen and you're gonna imagine pushing it forward o oh i'm definitely losing focus all right okay right no rubbish do you know what it is now i'm like can't perform so you immediately start thinking about it i saw it move but i didn't know i thought that was i was like i don't know if that was a problem that is insane i'm now an elden ring and i'm going to try and cast a spell through pushing an imaginary block i'm already thinking about it a little bit right here we go yes i didn't think i was going to get it as well yes that's great i can feel it honestly you feel so powerful this is like when you first pick up a video game and you do something incredibly rad like in skate you do a kickflip with an analog stick and you like discover a mechanic for the first time and it's not like anything else you've experienced in gaming this is unbelievable the feeling is just ridiculous but you also still unnerving a little bit it used to give me a headache at the beginning but that's just from the headset itself the actual process it requires a lot of focus and energy but it doesn't hurt i don't know how this has affected my brain properly but i have noticed that my focus has improved a lot which as someone with adhd has really helped me just do things day to day life when i'm not gaming you kind of have to focus a lot when you are trying to for example defeat a boss in elden ring because the way that the mental commands of visualizations work is that you have to think of the same thing every single time in the exact same way so if you deviate from from that a little bit if you think about something else then it just won't work so when you have a boss running towards you it can be really difficult to focus on for example sinking something and drinking a potion but that's just practice and i think that's why it has really helped improve my focus in general because being able to block that out and go internal in terms of what you're imagining is a really really useful skill i think the technology is out there to be able to control things with your mind they're controlling loads of prosthetics with it but no one's really applied it to gaming and by getting the technology out there my my thought process was that one it would be a really cool thing to do but also that it might raise a little bit awareness for what's possible and a lot of the time when we think about accessibility issues we think about what is the bare necessities but gaming and being involved with what your friends are doing and being involved with entertainment and media is also a necessity so if we can do something with this at some point in time with enough funding and development then that would be really cool okay i feel like i'm getting am i like hilariously sweaty oh my god i'm so sweaty do you want some powder no it's all right we'll embrace it and there's the controller your brain activity my brain activity is smaller than yours whoa crikey something's wrong with me imagine if you had an extra thumb all the amazing things you would be able to do like play the guitar faster or eat a bag of chips with one hand it's delicious well we went to the university of cambridge to find out what amazing things we could do with it the third thumb is a three d printed extra thumb for your hand that's controlled with your toes i was really trying to investigate that relationship between the wearer and a prosthetic i wanted to feel what it was like to be in control of something that i was wearing but that had kind of this proportional control that was responding to my movements what i really envision for the third thumb is more specific workplaces that then you do a slight redesign so for example i've spoken with a shoulder surgeon and he was really interested in being able to hold his multiple tools at the same time rather than collaborate with an assistant so how did danny start working on the third thumb i've always been interested in designing for the body i think that's so much more interesting as a product designer and then it wasn't until my masters at the royal college of art that i really started exploring prosthetics i'm not a medical professional working in prosthetics in the medical field that is a whole kind of different area i'm working in this more exploratory field trying to split it off into prosthetic versus augmentation and i just kind of see it all in the same movement we're just extending the human body an amputee is completely different to a congenital one hander yet societal perception is that they just have one arm and so they're missing something and that's not true and so if we start to try to like silo this technology like this is for augmentation and this is for prosthetics it's the same technology we're just talking about how you feel about that person and also they might not feel about that themselves is it a prosthetic is it for someone without a thumb or is it augmentation for someone with two thumbs it's both or it's either or it totally depends on the wearer dani's invention went viral online which meant her master's project turned into much more than just that when it went viral online i thought that's kind of where it would live in this online space that people could go or you know and really kind of spark these discussions and i just would have thousands of comments on videos and stuff like that of people going either way or also emailing me and letting me know their feelings about it as well and that's where i thought it would live but now it's in a whole different space could we give it to one of our crew yes absolutely your crew member can try one cool we're putting a third thumb on you today so we're going to go through this one first and then through there and then just going to turn on your ankles back to my feet your left foot is going to control the kind of up and back and your right foot is the kind of dominant foot it's going to control it across and back and it yeah there you go you're doing great so this is still like first minute of use yeah i feel like a natural yeah you look like a natural should we give you your first object i'd love to okay so right foot and press and hold perfect look at that how many can you normally pick up because you have quite large cakes i can order three oranges in my hand i can order four oranges in my hand with the third thumb i think that counts thank you two sugars no delicious should i take a drink oh no it happens to the best of us so just so you know we're going to have to put you in an mri scanner later oh okay we're going to be testing your brain cool and they actually did test my brain so that the activity inside it when i was using the third thumb could be studied by professor tamar macon it's not claustrophobic at all in here my name is tamale making and i'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience and my role is to run the lab that we call the plasticity lab in cambridge university i got this big grant meant to help me start establishing the first frontiers of human augmentation specifically allowing people to have extra body parts a colleague of mine told me he just watched this video of this extra robotic thumb that just looks amazing i've asked my student who was running the project at the time if she can try hunt down this person danny claude and that's how we started working together the interesting thing about the body and the brain is that you can't change one without the other when we're thinking about adding extra body parts or replacing body parts we are immediately implicating the brain if we could harness this technology in a thoughtful and responsible way we could really offer an incredible new opportunity for humanity to improve productivity since coming to cambridge university how much has danny's vision of the third thumb changed the fundamentals from the first prototype are definitely the same i certainly didn't think it would be so similar which i'm so quite impressed with and managed to like make it good the first time when the neuroscientists like kind of started collaborating with me on it i thought that they'd get rid of the foot control pretty quickly but it has lasted because it works so well we had almost six hundred participants come and try the third thumb for the first time and then we asked them to do a task within a minute ninety eight percent of people could use the third thumb within the first minute which is really important for pieces of technology like this so how's my brain activity looking tamar my clever students have processed the information that the machine has gathered we can look and see what happens when stu uses the thumb and what we find is that the brain areas that control the foot and control the hand they light up once he's using his third thumb over a longer period of time we might start seeing changes where the brain reconfigurates the representation of the hand the representation of the foot in order to allow for the thumb to grow in a different way was it hard to find stu's brain activity yes a beautiful activity in the right place to the right amount yes a wonderful brain activity oh thank goodness for that dani is a rock star to me i work with so many gifted people so smart so talented dani is all of that but she's also able to combine wonderful creative creativity with practicality which is a very complex combination to achieve i don't think i'd be doing this if i only collaborated with other designers i'm collaborating with neuroscientists and anthropologists and engineers and artists and that's what kind of makes this work so dynamic i'm constantly surprised that i'm still working on the third thumb i'm amazed that this thing that i made during my master degree is now being used for phds in neuroscience at cambridge university that's so mad to me and so inspiring and keeps pushing me forward to make it better feel the synapses firing in your mind i did feel like the synapses were popping in my mind they were moving crazy three hundred and sixty we have a huge library of scents jasmine chocolate bread coffee also of course vomit wait what smell of decomposing bodies and blood immersive experiences just got a whole lot spicier with the addition of smell and we decided to put it to the test this is smell vr that's being just doused in chocolate play that again meet anastasia and ivan the power couple behind london based startup sentient together they've invented an intoxicating new technology the e sense a central tracking system triggers the release of different smells between your shoulders and nose it can be used with a vr headset augmented glasses or a smartphone and can be used without a screen in actual reality so you can even smell your favorite painting a lot of devices are very intrusive so we've tried as hard as possible to design something that people would forget about when they're wearing it seamless as possible and it all started with a romantic stroll along london's south bank we caught a whiff of donuts that smell reminded us of childhood and in one particular place if you ask anyone from saint petersburg about that donut place they'll know which donut place you talk about it's historical and we started talking how would we share that experience if we were apart can we send a smell to each other that conversation quite quickly as being very technical people escalated from hypothetical hypothetical to philosophical to technical it got out of hand yes so how many smells does this thing hold up to six is the maximum we never in real life experience more than six scents within for example thirty minutes if you were in a video game and you go through one space to another and the scents keep changing more than six would become so overwhelming that you will start thinking about the scent not about the game and it's not going to be immersive before we try out the device i think we should test some of these smells you ready lou i'm ready i've prepared six different scents pick up a vial smell it just give it a little swish good luck okay thank you number a numero one oh what is that please don't be sick oh that's lovely it smells like glass cleaner it's like a mint but bubbly i think i've got i think it's lavender definitely citrus i think that's orange with a hint of flowers this one is looking a little stressful because it's very dark in color ooh smells like whiskey i guess if it was whiskey you'd just put whiskey in it though smells like my childhood i'm just gonna put childhood it smells like surface cleaner or like hospital oh oh that's like a car i think that might be hospital oh that's grim oh my god what is that oh like a seared steak i think that might be the rotten eggs oh oh is that like egg that is very realistic she smells like rotten egg that's got to be decomposing body leather fart as in i think you may have used leather to get to the fart consistency does it get worse and worse i'm going for d lavender i'm changing my answer ooh ooh it smells like a thai curry it's quite nice a licorice flower i know that smell that's university smell right there immature cheddar that is one hundred percent sick smelly feet oh oh i can still smell it oh it's in my nose fart again parmesan is that a decomposing body this one please be nice smells a bit like petrol that's all right it smells like latex gloves sainted latex gloves yeah i don't think we should quit our day jobs nail it now for the science what was happening in our brains during that smell test the smell is processed in the olfactory cortex and it's very closely associated with our survival instincts you know when you're walking down the street and you smell something that's not pleasant generally people either start looking for the source or try to get away from the smell and that's our fight or flight instinct we don't often know how we're going to act so who uses this technology one of the biggest applications of our technology is for training of emergency services smells can work in two ways they can either be clued to the environment adding for example a smell of natural gas which is silent and invisible but another side of smell smells sometimes they go into a place that smells really uncomfortable that split second of a distraction might cause a life so it's really important for them to use smells during training that are overpowering their senses to keep the focus how do you recreate the really nasty smells chemistry we work with scent labs and i also alter some of the smells to make sure they're more fitting for for the customer for some of the more difficult ones like a decomposing body obviously we don't know what it smells like you speak with people who do know so like paramedics for example and we've had a comment that once you're in the room it takes like days to actually get rid of it on you which is horrible but like okay what does it smell like and then we try to find something comparable some smells are made up of a surprising mix of notes an old fashioned hospital smith smell is mostly a smell of leather some people actually say oh this is the exact smell of the hospital that i stayed in several years ago and this just gives me flashbacks i think it's about time we try it out oh wow there is a bonfire oh i'm seeing the starry night sky oh there is a tent stuart's in the tent sweating yeah it's like when the fire's gone out and you're kind of getting the bit that you can smell on your clothes afterwards okay when there's wind in the at night or whenever and the bonfire is kind of blowing in your face it's lovely feels like you're actually there like you're sitting down you're kind of chilling in the fire oh wow it smells very authentic it's really clever really got the smell of like burning wood you know what you should do you should combine the chocolate and the bonfire you could make s' mores you're gonna smell it now i'm in a chocolate factory someone's like putting chocolates on a conveyor belt sounds like chocolate treacle oh there's like some melted chocolate being mixed that is gorgeous oh there are like some truffles with like chocolate being poured over oh play that again definitely not cadbury's one hundred not galaxies it's more like a hershey's type chocolate play that again and i could just sit here in this loop forever probably that'd be quite nice you know it'd be nice as well if you did like a few like roast dinner i would love a piece of that chocolate you can't you can't touch it that was so cool i think i also ate half of it god that smells good it's safe to say ivan and anastasia have created something truly sensational we hope that we'll become a go to sense solutions company making virtual training accessible and enhancing it with scent i think is one of the most important things for overall quality of training of emergency services so everywhere is safe no matter where you are你曾想過用意念玩遊戲，或是讓手多長出一根拇指嗎？這些都是改變我們體驗世界的神奇創新。這位實況主找到了一種用意念玩遊戲的方法，在《艾爾登法環》、《最後一戰》和《極速賽車》等遊戲中都獲得成功，而且完全不需要控制器。最棒的是，不只有 Perrie 辦得到，用意念玩遊戲，顧名思義，就是用意念玩遊戲。所以以我的情況來說，我有一個 eeg 可以偵測我的腦部活動，然後我把它轉譯成按下虛擬控制器上的按鈕。eeg 或 electroencephalogram，我花了幾個星期才學會怎麼說，它是一堆貼在頭皮上的電極，可以偵測來
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