Open source BCI for XR headsets: what OpenBCI Galea measures

OpenBCI is a Brooklyn-based neurotechnology company. Joel Murphy and Conor Russomanno, who is the current CEO, founded it after a Kickstarter campaign in late 2013, and the company has been making open source tools for biosensing and neuroscience from 2014 onward. Galea, announced in November 2020, is its platform for immersive headsets: hardware that fits onto head-mounted displays, plus software development kits that feed the data into common development environments.

The idea behind this open source BCI work is simple to state. A game, a training simulation or a study can log what the body does while a person plays, and not only what the person clicks. A brain-computer interface (BCI) of this kind reads electrical activity through sensors worn on the head.

OpenBCI has described Galea as including electroencephalography (EEG), electrooculography (EOG), electromyography (EMG), electrodermal activity (EDA) and photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors. In plain terms, EEG covers brain activity, EOG eye movement, EMG muscle activity, EDA changes in skin conductance and PPG pulse. According to the company, the analytics suite reads signals from the brain, eyes, heart, skin and muscles in real time, and developers can use that stream to estimate states such as attention and interest.

Those emotion estimates are the vendor's claim. At the time of the announcement OpenBCI also said its open source headsets, boards and electrodes were used by researchers, academic labs, artists and developers in 89 countries, and that early access to Galea for researchers and developers would start in 2021.

Guillermo Bernal, an MIT researcher and a key engineer on the project, said the platform would let teams evaluate and customize virtual experiences in new ways. At the 2019 Game Developers Conference, Mike Ambinder, a principal experimental psychologist at Valve, had argued that headset-mounted EEG could one day give designers data for more reactive games.

The OpenBCI shop has a Galea page. It lists the headset at $42,980, shows the item as sold out, offers a notify option and a quote request, and points buyers to galea.co for technical specifications. The same page lists a Pupil Labs Neon eye-tracking add-on among the accessories. The OpenBCI home page also loads. For teams that want open source BCI tooling inside an XR headset, Galea is the OpenBCI product aimed at that job.

Galea is a measurement tool for game research and not a game itself, so it has no entry in the games directory. Teams that plan a study around it should budget for the headset price alone before any development time.