Loser: Mental Block
Published: Feb 3, 2009Controlling 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.
Such a hair-trigger response would require some pretty significant breakthroughs in electroencephalography (EEG). Researchers have been using this form of brain-wave monitoring since the 1920s, largely because it is simple and cheap to operate. Still, scalp EEG sensors like Emotiv’s are far less accurate than experimental setups that insert electrodes into the brain through holes drilled in the skull, as was done with the monkeys who were taught to control robot arms.
Read more on IEEE Spectrum Online
