Brain-Powered Unity Controller

I put on the headset, relaxed, and watched an object move in a Unity scene on a second screen, driven by nothing but my brain activity.

The challenge

Our group explored "Immersive Interfaces", one of our technology convergence themes: ways of controlling technology that feel closer to how we think than a keyboard does. The open question was whether a consumer-grade headset with dry electrodes would give a signal good enough to use at all.

I also wanted more than a single demo. The brain data had to be a foundation the data science team could build on: streamed, shared and analysed in the cloud, not trapped on one laptop.

What I built

The headset reads brain activity and turns it into two measures, focus and relaxation. Those numbers drive a Unity scene in near real time. I also built a small chat interface in Unity where an AI assistant receives your focus and relaxation along with each message, so it can adapt how it talks to you: more concise when you're focused, gentler when you're relaxed.

How it came together

The headset was chosen by the group before I joined the project, so my two weeks went into the distributed pipeline: getting raw brain data off the device, into the cloud, back out as meaningful signals, and into an engine. The dry electrodes worried us, but the focus and relaxation values looked accurate in practice.

It was a prototype, and I kept its scope honest: there was no per-person calibration and no fallback control. The priority was the data foundation.

What happened

A couple of managers saw it working and were amazed. The pipeline stayed behind as something the data science team could extend.

What I'd take forward

I want to use brain state in my music production: record my EEG while I'm producing in a flow state, then use those values to drive visuals synced to the finished song, so listeners experience the track the way it felt to make it. Further out, I'm excited for headsets good enough to feed a personal agent that learns from my mental state instead of a journal I have to write by hand.