Dino Game

Developed by Prakhar Sinha, Maitri Khanna, Raymond Doan, Avni Bafna, Brian Nguyen, Nhu Bui, Ankita Chatterjee

The Dino Game was one of the first fully functional BCI projects that we developed. It was quite rudimentary but it was a major stepping stone for our club to build more interesting and complex BCI’s.

What it did

The Dino Game BCI was spawned out of the need to have a project to show off at the 2023 Davis Neurofest event. This was an event dedicated to showcasing UC Davis’s advancements in neurotechnology and Neuroscience. We needed to completely develop this project in less than 3 months.

After brainstorming, we came to the conclusion that making a BCI based on the famous Chrome “no-internet game” would be a crowd-pleaser and it would also be a project that wouldn’t be too difficult to develop. We chose the Dino Game, in particular, because it was a game that required very minimal inputs and therefore would be a good first project for us to develop in such a short amount of time.

The hardware we used was the Muse 2. Compared to the OpenBCI Cyton, the Muse 2 is a lot easier to set up and develop. Indeed, a big reason for making a lot of the decisions that we made on this project was due to time constraints. Following this logic, we opted to use the Muse 2 instead of the Muse for ease of development.

The Dino Game functioned as follows. On the “front-end”, the user was able to interact with a recreation of the Chrome “no-internet” game that we cloned off of GitHub. The way the user would interact with the game was by blinking their eyes in order to make the dino jump over obstacles. It was meant to be a simple, but powerful, demonstration of what BCI hardware, like the Muse 2, could accomplish.