A team of Imperial students has developed a slot racing set that is controlled with thoughts alone and will be available to try at Imperial Festival.

Imperial Festival has always been about showing rather than telling − but this year, interactive learning will be taken to the next level, with an exhibit that will allow visitors to drive a slot racing set using their thoughts alone.

It’s the result of a project by second year Bioengineering students as part of their engineering design project, supervised by Dr Ian Radcliffe. Often, ideas for these projects spring from consulting with the local community, disabled athletes and charities. In this case it came about after talking to pupils at John Chilton Special Needs School in Northholt, some of whom don’t have the required arm function or capability to control things like a computer mouse or a joystick.

The Imperial students set about building a system that would open up new avenues for the pupils to control games in different ways. They first selected suitable off-the-shelf hardware interfaces, including an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset by Nuerosky (left) and a myoelectic band by MyoBand (below) which fits over the forearm and can respond to small gestures. They adapted the devices and devised a way to connect them to popular slot racing sets, including Carrera and Scalextric. The result is a system that allows users to control the speed of the car by either thinking intensely about going faster in the case of the EEG, or moving their arm up or down slightly with the myoelectric band. Another group developed a remote controled car that can be steered using eye movements.

The students have already tested the technology successful at a demonstration day and will be officially rolling it out on the School’s Day of Imperial Festival on Friday 5 May, where the pupils of John Chilton School will have the first try – followed by the general public on Saturday and Sunday.

“It’s the first time we’ve done something designed with Imperial Festival in mind as an end goal − as opposed to just gathering some of our projects together and hoping people want to see them,” Ian says. “It’s always quite a learning experience to do the Festival, because you get a such a range of people there. But the feedback you get leads to new ideas and uses you never would have considered being in the classroom or even just meeting with the intended user. You get some novel ideas that are actually quite beneficial.”

Imperial Festival runs from Saturday 6 to Sunday 7 May, visit the website for more details