An Affective Interaction System using Virtual Reality and Brain-Computer Interface

Affective Computing is a multidisciplinary area of research that allows computers to perform human emotion recognition, with potential applications in areas such as healthcare, gaming and intuitive human computer interface design. Hence, this paper proposes an affective interaction system using dry EEG-based Brain-Computer Interface and Virtual Reality (BCI-VR). The proposed BCI-VR system integrates existing low-cost consumer devices such as an EEG headband with frontal and temporal dry electrodes for brain signal acquisition, and a low-cost VR headset that houses an Android handphone. The handphone executes an in-house developed software that connects wirelessly to the headband, processes the acquired EEG signals, and displays VR content to elicit emotional responses. The proposed BCI-VR system was used to collect EEG data from 13 subjects while they watched VR content that elicits positive or negative emotional responses. EEG bandpower features were extracted to train Linear Discriminant and Support Vector Machine classifiers. The classification performances of these classifiers on this dataset and the results of a public dataset (SEED-IV) are then evaluated. The results in classifying positive vs negative emotions in both datasets (66% for 2-class) show promise that positive and negative emotions can be detected by the proposed low cost BCIVR system, yielding nearly the same performance on the public dataset that used wet EEG electrodes. Hence the results show promise of the proposed BCI-VR system for real-time affective interaction applications in future.