Recognizing Evoked Potentials in a Virtual Environment

Virtual reality (VR) provides immersive and controllable experimental environments. It expands the bounds of possible evoked potential (EP) experiments by providing complex, dynamic environments in order to study cognition without sacrificing environmental control. VR also serves as a safe dynamic testbed for brain-computer .interface (BCl) research. However, there has been some concern about detecting EP signals in a complex VR environment. This paper shows that EPs exist at red, green, and yellow stop lights in a virtual driving environment. Experimental results show the existence of the P3 EP at "go" and "stop" lights and the contingent negative variation (CNY) EP at "slow down" lights. In order to test the feasibility of on-line recognition in VR, we looked at recognizing the P3 EP at red stop tights and the absence of this signal at yellow slow down lights. Recognition results show that the P3 may successfully be used to control the brakes of a VR car at stop lights.