A Comparison of Three Different NeuroTag Visualization Media: Brain Visual Stimuli by Monitor, Augmented and Virtual Reality Devices

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) proved to overcome some limitations of other input modes (e.g., gestures, voice, haptic, etc.). BCIs are able to detect the brain activity, thus identifying searched patterns. When a specific brain activity is recognized, a well-defined action can be triggered, thus implementing a human-machine interaction paradigm. BCIs can be used in different domains ranging from industry to services for impaired people. This paper considers BCIs that can be designed and developed by the NextMind, which is a small and ergonomics device to capture the activity of the visual cortex. Objects called NeuroTags can be inserted in both 2D and 3D scenes; these objects act like switches when the user is able to focus on them. The aim of this work is to evaluate different NeuroTag configurations (varying in terms of size and distance) as well as different visualization devices: a monitor, a virtual reality head-mounted display, and an augmented reality head-mounted display. User tests outline that the best tradeoff between robustness and selection speed is obtained by medium-size and medium-spaced NeuroTags; on the other hand, monitor visualization outperforms the AR solution, whereas it is not possible to identify statistically significant differences between monitor-VR and AR-VR.