ieee Spectrum Online: Loser: Mental Block

Emotiv says its game controller works at the speed of thought, but it doesn't. Controlling objects with just your thoughts has been a dream of sci-fi from “Star Trek” to Star Wars, but in the past few years that dream has inched closer to reality. Brain-computer interfaces have allowed wheelchair-bound quadriplegics to move cursors on screens and monkeys to control robot arms.

Now a San Francisco–based company called Emotiv Systems is trying to bring the technology to PC game applications. It had planned to release its Epoc headset, a plastic frame dotted with 16 electrodes, in time for Christmas, but now the company says only that it’ll put the thing on sale “soon,” for about US $300.

How the Epoc works isn’t entirely clear. The company says that it relies exclusively on brain waves, but independent observers say that it might instead be picking up other sorts of signals. In either case, the headset couldn’t let you manipulate fast-moving characters in Grand Theft Auto just by thinking about it. ---

(page 2) --- Non-EEG biofeedback devices have been around for a long time. Atari’s MindLink headband, launched in 1984 to work with the then-popular Atari 2600 console, actually had nothing to do with brain waves, but it did read muscle motions in the user’s forehead. In 1998, a Nintendo-compatible game called Bio Tetris let users influence play by adjusting their heart rates. Likewise, the Journey to Wild Divine system, launched in 2003, monitors heart rate and skin conductance via finger-mounted sensors and uses this data in a variety of relaxation games. And OCZ Technology’s Neural Impulse Actuator, an Epoc-like headset launched earlier this year, modestly allows you to “play games using biosignals”—not thoughts.

To be sure, in the lab EEG readings have proved robust enough to allow people to play rudimentary versions of games like Pac-Man and Pong and to navigate though Google Earth. In BrainBall, a game launched by Sweden’s Interactive Institute in 2000, two players try to move a ball by achieving a certain brain state, thereby “out-relaxing” the opponent.

You could argue, therefore, that Emotiv is doing us all a service by making an improvement—even just an incremental one—in a new kind of input control, much as Nintendo’s Wii did last year, with its motion-sensing wands. And games specifically designed to take advantage of the biofeedback of Emotiv-like systems could lead to new gaming genres.

Read the entire article here.