A Wizard of Oz Study to Explore How the Young Population Perceives Brain-Computer Interfaces

This paper describes a wizard-of-oz (Woz) study that was performed to gather insights on how 44 teenagers perceive Brain-Computer Interfaces and how they imagine interacting with this technology in the domain of home automation. Ten questions were asked before users tested a fake BCI supposed to allow a mental control on a lamp, a fan and a radio. Three other questions were asked after the Woz experiment to gather users' feelings. Our study showed that young people were influenced in their perception of their own abilities to control connected objects (lamp, fan, radio) with a BCI, thanks to the Wizard of Oz technique. Thirty participants (68.2%) strongly believe they can control an object using their brain waves after the Woz experiment, whereas there were only eight (18.2%) strongly agree with this assertion before the WOz experiment. All participants, except two, changed their minds favorably after the experiment. A science fiction approach to the question of a subject's ability to interact with a BCI, and his or her ability to interact with a computer by means of thought, is a way of influencing the subject's perception of the possibility of implementing such an interface not in a fictional way, but in a very real one. This feeling may be reinforced by the fact that the BCI seems to behave as expected by the subject. However, we are not making any assumptions about how a fake BCI might be used by an uninitiated audience, or how it might be interpreted by them.