Unicorn: The Brain Interface

Unicorn Hybrid Black is a high-quality wearable EEG-headset for brain-computer interface (BCI) applications to perfectly acquire brain waves. Developers, artists, and makers are able to acquire and process brain signals, ranging from simple display of the signals to design and control attached devices, to interact with artistic installations, toys, computer programs or applications. Users can not only acquire EEG data from eight Unicorn Hybrid EEG Electrodes; they can analyze and process the data with the Unicorn Suite, the main software environment. EEG data is sampled at 250 Hz per channel with 24-bit resolution. The patented Unicorn Hybrid EEG Electrodes allow users to record dry or with gel and therefore enables usage for many different BCI applications. Reference and ground EEG electrodes are fixed on the mastoids of the user for perfect noise reduction. The Unicorn Brain Interface is extremely lightweight to reduce movement artifacts. It fits perfectly to different head shapes and keeps the device in position to guarantee the solid contact of the electrode to the scalp, which is key for high-quality EEG recordings. The battery lasts for two hours. Status LEDs show operational status of the device. 

Unicorn Suite Software: The Unicorn Hybrid Black is fully programmable and comes with the Unicorn Suite software environment that includes the Unicorn Recorder, Unicorn C API, and Unicorn .NET API to acquire, visualize, and store data or to perform real-time analysis of brain activity. The Unicorn Suite can be used with a valid license.

• The Unicorn Recorder application visualizes and records brain activity of eight positions on the head (FZ, C3, CZ, C4, PZ, PO7, OZ, PO8). The data can be notch and bandpass filtered to suppress artifacts or to extract certain frequency bands like alpha and beta. The data is stored in XML format and can be read by self-made programs or can be loaded with the optional offline processing toolbox g.BSanalyze from g.tec.
• The Unicorn C and .NET API components are application programming interfaces (APIs), enabling the communication with the Unicorn Brain Interface from C/C++ and C# applications. These can also provide a way to access the Unicorn Brain Interface from MATLAB, via MATLAB’s C & .NET interfaces.

Additionally, standalone applications like Unicorn Speller and Unicorn Simulink Interface can be purchased separately and used within the Unicorn Suite software environment. 

• The Unicorn Speller is a spelling system that uses the P300 paradigm and comes with the Unicorn Sphero and Unicorn Painting applications. The software offers speller boards consisting of letters and numbers for communication and control. Users concentrate on specific characters on the speller board in order to select them mentally.
• The Unicorn Simulink^® Interface is a library enabling the communication with the Unicorn Brain Interface from MATLAB^® and Simulink applications. The Unicorn Simulink Interface allows you to read recorded data into Simulink and to perform real-time processing. The raw binary data stream is converted into physical values so the user receives data ready to analyze. It requires MATLAB and Simulink 2017a with the Signal Processing Toolbox™.

The Unicorn Suite Hybrid Black requires Windows 10 Professional, 64 Bit, English language and a computer (minimum 2GHz, 20-30 GB hard disk, 4GB RAM, a Bluetooth^® Adapter with Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR support). For Unicorn Recorder, Unicorn C API and Unicorn .NET API the NET Framework 4.7.1, desktop development with C++ workload and Microsoft^® Visual Studio 2015 are required.