Cyber Trainer
Scientists from Moscow State University have created a neurointerface for training esports athletes
Russian neurophysiologists have created a brain-computer interface that will help fans of computer games improve their reactions and express themselves better during competitions. Esports clubs have already become interested in this development, the press service of the university reported.
Graduate student of Moscow State University Nikolay Syrov, one of the developers of the E-Boi platform, is testing the platform on himself. Photo: MSU.
"This method can be used not only by healthy people who want to improve some of their skills. Training motor functions using the brain-computer interface can be just as attractive for patients who have suffered a stroke or neurotrauma," says Lev Yakovlev, a graduate student at the Faculty of Biology at Moscow State University.
In the last 10 years, neurophysiologists have managed to make a real breakthrough in the field of creating neurointerfaces – a set of microchips, special electrodes and computer programs that allow connecting cyber–extremities, artificial eyes and even those sensory organs that have no analogues in nature - thermal imagers and X-ray imagers to the brain of humans and animals.
For example, in March 2013, Brazilian and American scientists were able to combine the brains of two rats living thousands of kilometers from each other into a kind of "local network", or, as the scientists themselves called this design, "organic computer", and teach them to exchange information.
Later, they created a similar "collective mind" by combining the brains of three monkeys, and two years ago, other researchers were able to replace the damaged part of the hippocampus, the memory center in the brain of mice, and rid them of the "groundhog syndrome" (endless repetition of the same actions – VM). Recently, Russian and American scientists have created neural interfaces that stimulate memory and relieve fatigue.
Yakovlev and several other graduate students of the MSU Biofac, working under Alexander Kaplan, a well-known Russian neurophysiologist, created another similar system, which they called E-Boi.
It does not improve brain function by itself, but it allows anyone to improve their reaction speed by adjusting a special simulator to the individual characteristics of their nervous system.
At its core, it resembles AimBooster, a well-known program for training the coordination of movements and the accuracy of the mouse, which is used by many esports players who play various network shooters.
Unlike the classic version of this simulator, E-Boi not only tracks movements and mouse clicks, but also simultaneously monitors the activity of the cerebral cortex using an electroencephalograph. The program tracks how the activity of nerve cells in the center of brain movement changes, and adjusts its work to each athlete.
At the second stage of training, an esports player should not touch the mouse, but imagine how he does it without making any movements. At this time, communication between cortical neurons and motor neurons improves in the brain. After the end of the "mental" training, the researchers again measure the performance of the esports player in the application.
Now neurophysiologists are optimizing the operation of this system, and together with schoolchildren from the Sirius educational center, they are creating new variants of tasks for training reaction speed and other skills, as well as applications for mobile devices. In the near future, the project team plans to produce its own equipment and work even more closely with domestic teams of esports players.
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