`Eye as a Camera in XR: Reading Images, Colours and Eye Strain from a Consumer EEG Headband and a Consumer VR Headset`

IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) 2027
Las Vegas, USA, January 2027 · Submitted to IEEE ICCE 2027; not yet published

Four source pictures (a 2019 portrait, Lincoln, Tesla and a cartoon officer) above four coarse versions of them reconstructed from EEG

What the eye saw (top) and what the brain gave back (bottom): pictures rebuilt from the brain's response to flicker, 16 by 16 cells in four grey levels, and a 12 by 14 picture in eight colours.

Here is the trick, and it still feels like magic every time we run it. A square flickers on a screen, you look at it, and the back of your head answers: your visual cortex hums at the same rate, and we can read that hum with a cheap EEG headband. Flicker the square at one spot after another, keep score of how strongly each spot was seen, and you have taken a photograph with your eye. Steve Mann showed this in 2019 with lab equipment. We wanted to know how far it goes on gear that costs less than a phone.

So we rebuilt the camera from consumer parts: a Muse 2 headband with one extra cup electrode on the back of the head, and a Meta Quest headset as the screen, so the flicker is the same for everyone and the room does not matter. From the same recording we read greyscale pictures, colour (by showing red, green and blue planes one at a time), how fine a line you can resolve, and how tired your eyes are getting. Then we printed one of the pictures as a die, because why not.

The companion project turns the rig around into an eye exam that needs no letters, no language and no answers: you just look. We think a community health worker could run it out of a backpack. Richard Fletcher of the MIT Media Lab's Mobile Technology Group is working on that with us.

Person wearing a Meta Quest 3S headset over a Muse headband in a dark room — The whole camera: a Meta Quest 3S over a Muse 2 headband, plus one gold cup electrode we added at the back of the head, where the visual cortex is loudest.

Three test screens as seen in the headset: black and white stripes, a black quadrant on white, and a solid green field, each with a fixation dot — What you see inside the headset, one test at a time: stripes to find how fine a line you can resolve, a quadrant to map your visual field, a colour.

A small white 3-D printed cube with a raised pattern of cells on its face, sitting on a printer bed — A picture decoded from the brain, printed as a die. Because once you can photograph with an eye, you want to hold the photo.

Two white 3-D printed eye charts with raised letters from large to small — Eye charts printed in relief for the companion eye-exam project, so a chart can be checked by touch as well as by sight.

Three grids of coloured squares: the eight colours shown, the colours decoded from EEG, and the decoded colours snapped to the nearest of the eight

Colour, three planes at a time: the eight colours we showed, what the EEG decoded, and the decoded colours snapped to the nearest of the eight.

This paper is not yet published, so this page gives only a short summary. The full write-up and a link to the paper will follow publication.

Authors

Alexander Vicol, Minu Adefriskey, Michel Herrera Viyella, Khalil Chaghouri, Ali Sher, Richard R. Fletcher (MIT), Steve Mann

`Eye as a Camera in XR: Reading Images, Colours and Eye Strain from a Consumer EEG Headband and a Consumer VR Headset`

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