A Novel BCI Paradigm Combined with Augmented Reality

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) were useful in many scenarios; however current computer screen-based BCIs (CS-BCIs) were not wearable. We proposed AR-BCI, a BCI combined with augmented reality, in which a translucent head-mounted display (HMD) was used as the user interface so that the users could wear this AR-BCI and see virtual stimuli and real environment simultaneously. We recruited ten subjects in this study. Each subject completed predefined tasks with the AR-BCI (as the experiment group) and a CS-BCI (as the control group) respectively. We used the accuracies and information transfer rates (ITRs) of the BCIs as the performance metrics. The experimental results showed that two BCIs had almost the same accuracies (about 81% for the AR-BCI and about 82% for the CS-BCI) and almost the same ITRs (about 11.3 bits/min for the AR-BCI and about 11.7 bits/min for the CS-BCI). The AR-BCI we proposed might be useful for a disability assistance scenario.