Quantitative Measurements of Brain Activations in Virtual Reality Environments

Abstract

Electrophysiology measures of the brain indicate substantial responses when the brain participates in tasks of varying complexity levels. These responses vary widely depending on the context and support in better understanding of brain functioning in healthy persons and those with neurodevelopmental problems. Virtual Reality (VR) environments of different complexities induce significantly varying event-related potentials (ERP) in the brain. In this work, the P300 wave, which is an ERP that is employed in the analysis of cognitive abilities of people has been considered for identifying brain engagement during VR based gaming processes. This work primarily focuses on identifying the brain regions that are active during virtual reality gaming environments of varying complexity levels. Further, the analysis to identify the optimal electrode locations for the P300 acquisition for the respective Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) application has also been performed. Various performance metrics such as task engagement, arousal and valence have been identified to infer the participant's mental state at the time of cognitive training with P300 based BCI. Thus, this work seems to support the neuro game developers to identify the active brain regions under various cognitive tasks and assist the participants to be more engaged in the VR based game.