Motion-onset visually evoked potentials (mVEPs) are neural potentials that are time-locked to the onset of motion of evoking stimuli. Due to their visually elegant properties, mVEP stimuli may be suited to video game control given gaming's inherent demand on the users' visual attention and the requirement to process rapidly changing visual information. Here, we investigate mVEPs associated with 5 different stimuli to control the position of a car in a visually rich 3D racing game in a group of 15 BCI naïve teenagers and compared to 19 BCI naive adults. Results from an additional 14 BCI experienced adults were compared to BCI naïve adults. Our results demonstrate that game control accuracy is related to the number of trials used to make a decision on the users' chosen button/stimulus (76%, 62% and 35% for 5, 3 and 1 trials, respectively) and information transfer rate (ITR) (13.4, 13.9 and 6.6 bits per minute (BPM)), although, even though accuracy decreases when using three compared to the commonly used five trial repetitions, ITR is maintained. A Kruskal-Wallis test suggests that BCI naïve adults do not outperform BCI naïve teenagers in the 3D racing game in the first and seconds laps (p > 0.05), but do outperform in the third lap (p < 0.05). A comparison between BCI naïve and BCI experienced adults indicates BCI experienced adults do not perform better than BCI naïve adults (p > 0.05).

Motion-onset visual evoked potentials (mVEPs) are time and phase-locked brain responses to motion-related stimuli. An mVEP response provides robust features for brain-computer interface (BCI) applications and have the added benefit of being less visually fatiguing than other visual evoked potentials (VEPs). In this study an mVEP BCI that enables control of a visually rich, 3-dimensional (3D) car-racing video-game is evaluated. A group of fifteen teenage school children (13-16 years old) participated in a single session while they attended a summer school. Participants were asked to control the direction of a car within a realistic racing circuit, where the position of the car was controlled by focusing on one of five motion-related stimuli. Classification accuracy (%) and information transfer rate (ITR) (bits per minute (bpm)) results were encouraging, with participants achieving an average online accuracy of 72% (12bpm) in the first lap, 67% (10bpm) in the second lap and 65% (10bpm) in the third lap (chance accuracy and ITR is 20% and zero bpm). The study shows for the first time the feasibility of using the mVEP paradigm in a commercial-grade car-racing video-game. It is also one of the first reports on the performance of a group of teenagers using a BCI.

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Motion Onset Visually Evoked Potentials (mVEPs) allow users to interact with technology using non-visually fatiguing stimuli in a Brain Computer Interface (BCI). This study employs mVEP in an onscreen controller and evaluates players' ability to use mVEP for online gameplay with games from three different genres namely action, puzzle and sports. The onscreen controller consists of five mVEP stimuli that are presented as buttons to allow the participant to choose from five different actions in each game. The performance was assessed based on online BCI accuracy and game score for each game. Results indicate that the players could control the games with an average online accuracy of 71% (5 class classification chance accuracy is 20%). The results also suggest that the use of the mVEP controller with a detailed environment and stimulating feedback in the form of an action game helped to attain the highest online accuracy (75%).

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