A VR headset with a strap of EEG electrodes arching over it, in front of brainwave traces labelled alpha, beta, theta, gamma and delta scrolling across a dark grid.

The brain-VR directory

Every open project wiring brains into VR.

BCI Depo lists the code, hardware, research and news where EEG and other neural signals meet virtual reality, from VRChat avatars whose ears follow your focus to Unity builds that decode imagined movement on a Quest 3. Every listing links to its source.

Browse avatar projects Start here

The shelves

Six shelves, one subject

Avatars

Brainwaves on your VRChat avatar

Tools that send focus, relaxation, band power and trained thought commands to avatar parameters over OSC, plus the face, heart-rate and OSC plumbing they lean on.

Browse avatar projects

VR builds

Unity and WebXR projects

Thesis projects, hackathon entries and published research: gaze plus EEG selection, motor imagery avatars, SSVEP on a Quest and neurofeedback rehabilitation.

Browse VR builds

Toolkits

Acquisition, streaming and analysis

BrainFlow, Lab Streaming Layer, MNE-Python and the other libraries every project on this site is built on.

Browse toolkits

Hardware

Headsets people actually use

From a four-channel Muse headband to the OpenBCI Galea, what each one can measure and how it fits under a VR strap.

Compare hardware

Industry

Labs, companies and the law

Valve and OpenBCI, Synchron on Apple Vision Pro, Meta's EMG wristband, and the US states now protecting neural data.

Read the industry shelf

Start here

Your first brain-driven avatar

A headset, BrainFlow and VRChat's OSC ports, in five steps, with the limits of consumer EEG spelled out before you buy anything.

Read the guide

Most-starred VR project

BrainFlowsIntoVRChat

Almost every hobby brain-VR setup in the wild runs ChilloutCharles's BrainFlowsIntoVRChat. It reads any headset BrainFlow supports and sends over forty OSC parameters to a VRChat avatar: focus and relaxation scores, alpha to gamma band power for each side of the head, heart rate and breathing where the hardware reports them, and a machine-learned classifier for thought commands you train yourself.

It went viral when a player called Rantis posted a clip of moving their avatar's ears with a Muse 2. It is MIT-licensed, still actively maintained, and has its own community Discord.

346 GitHub stars

40+ Avatar parameters

Any BrainFlow-supported headset

MIT License

View on GitHub All avatar projects

Before you buy a headset

What consumer EEG can and can't do

Artefacts

Your face is louder than your brain

Forehead electrodes pick up jaw clenches, frowns and blinks at many times the size of real brain activity. Plenty of brain-controlled-ears clips are partly face-controlled ears. Fine for flair, misleading as mind-reading.

Latency

Focus and relax are slow

They are smoothed ratios of band power over seconds. They suit moods like drooping ears and shifting colours, not anything that needs to happen on cue.

Reliability

Thought commands are fragile

A trained classifier gives you a handful of triggers, calibrated per person, and accuracy drifts between sessions as the headset shifts and the gel or skin changes.

Alternatives

Other biosignals are steadier

Heart rate over OSC and eye and face tracking through VRCFaceTracking are more dependable today, and often make a better first project.

New to this?

From headband to twitching ears in an evening

The guide walks through the hardware, the software and the five settings that matter, with the caveats up front.

Start here About this directory