CVR-BBI: an open-source VR platform for multi-user collaborative brain to brain interfaces

• Published in: Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) England), 2024-11, Vol.40 (12)
• Main Authors: Liu, Di, Wei, Yina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Applications Note; Brain - physiology; Brain-Computer Interfaces; Electroencephalography - methods; Female; Humans; Male; Software; User-Computer Interface; Virtual Reality
• ISSN: 1367-4811; 1367-4803; 1367-4811
• DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btae676

As brain imaging and neurofeedback technologies advance, the brain-to-brain interface (BBI) has emerged as an innovative field, enabling in-depth exploration of cross-brain information exchange and enhancing our understanding of collaborative intelligence. However, no open-source virtual reality (VR) platform currently supports the rapid and efficient configuration of multi-user, collaborative BBIs. To address this gap, we introduce the Collaborative Virtual Reality Brain-to-Brain Interface (CVR-BBI), an open-source platform consisting of a client and server. The CVR-BBI client enables users to participate in collaborative experiments, collect electroencephalogram (EEG) data, and manage interactive multisensory stimuli within the VR environment. Meanwhile, the CVR-BBI server manages multi-user collaboration paradigms, and performs real-time analysis of the EEG data. We evaluated the CVR-BBI platform using the SSVEP paradigm and observed that collaborative decoding outperformed individual decoding, validating the platform's effectiveness in collaborative settings. The CVR-BBI offers a pioneering platform that facilitates the development of innovative BBI applications within collaborative VR environments, thereby enhancing the understanding of brain collaboration and cognition. CVR-BBI is released as an open-source platform, with its source code being available at https://github.com/DILIU1/CVR-BBI.