Game with Your Brain

Description

Warfighter Engaged is an all volunteer effort adapting game controllers, recreational, and independence items for severely injured and disabled veterans. They came to us looking for assistance prototyping various technologies as inputs to the Xbox Adaptive Controller. During the hackathon, I was the developer team lead, responsible for gathering and parsing the sensor data, as well as emitting it for the adaptive controller, In our initial prototype, we used several Arduinos, a deconstructed Star Wars Force Trainer EMG headset, and two EEG sensors to emit both analog and digital signals to the adaptive controller. Our project took home 2nd Place in the Gaming for Everyone category at that hackathon.

After the hackathon, I joined as a co-project lead, and over the course of the next few years, we continued to iterate on the project. We started by getting more advanced hardware like new EMG sensors and the Emotiv EEG headset, which included gyrometer data. I lead the analysis of the gyrometer data and how to use it as another potential signal to inputs.

Our final stages of the project were a total re-write using Rust, allowing us to simplify the hardware footprint significantly from multiple Arduinos to a single Raspberry Pi.