Extended Reality (XR) headsets with Psychophysiological measurement capability

Contracting authority is publishing direct award notice for 'XR headsets'.

BACKGROUND INFO TAUCHI Research Center (https://research.tuni.fi/tauchi/) at Tampere University (hereinafter ‘TAU’) conducts research in human-technology interaction in collaboration with partners from several societal sectors. The research infrastructure at TAU provides leading technologies for multimodal and multisensory interaction, including haptics, gaze, speech, XR and human physiological measurement. NEED TAU presently has psychophysiological measurement systems (EEG, EMG, ECG, SC, Eye trackers, Motion Capture, etc.) and extended reality systems (Varjo, Oculus, HTC Vive, etc.). Utilizing these systems together is laborious. Working with wet electrodes, electrode caps, wires, and pressure points caused by VR headset on top of the EEG caps is difficult and error prone. Thus, devices that integrate the different sensor and output channels into one device that is easy to put on and take off is needed. MARKET ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION FOR DIRECT AWARD A number of products that aim to satisfy the need identified above are available. - CleverPoint is an add-on to Oculus/Meta XR headsets that has measurement electrodes in the mask padding and a separate lead for ECG measurement. These sensors are able to measure frontal EEG and facial EMG plus the ECG channel. The shortcoming in this product is that the EEG coverage is insufficient. Also, the XR headset is a consumer grade device without the focal area inset that enables very high pixel desity in VR. - OpenBCI Galea is built into a Varjo XR-3 headset frame with dry electrodes under all of the head-facing surfaces of the device. XR-3 has built-in eye tracking. Like CleverPoint, Galea also measures facial EMG, EOG, PPG, and EDA. - DSI-VR300 is an EEG recording device built in a HTC Vive VR-headset frame. This product is focused only on EEG and the included VR-headset is an older model. - Multiple earlier prototype systems and discontinued products can also be found. Here, however, we can only consider products with continued availability, hardware spare part availability, and supported software. Out of these, OpenBCI Galea is the best system in terms of XR image quality and widest EEG site coverage. In addition, it is the only one with eye tracking built in the headset. Thus, TAU has concluded that Galea is the only available device that meets our needs. Consequently, university will purchase two Galea devices from OpenBCI.