What if it were possible to explore your brain in virtual reality, watching your thoughts flashing before your eyes? A team of neuroscientists and software developers have created a way to do precisely that. A system combines brain scanning,recording and virtual reality to allow a user to see a person’s brain in real-time.
This "glass brain" was demonstrated here at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival today (March 10). The system was developed bycomputational neuroscientists Tim Mullen and Christian Kothe of the University of California, San Diego, in collaboration with the lab of Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, using a virtual reality headset made by the gaming company Oculus Rift.
"We’ve never been able to step inside the structures [of the brain] and see it in this way," Gazzaley said. "It’s biofeedback on the next level."
Independently, Gazzaley has been collaborating with Philip Rosedale, creator of the game Second Life, on using virtual reality to improve neuroscience, and vice versa.