Control video games by your thoughts

The future is here! Playing video games by thought alone will soon be possible with this brain controlled headset.



Emotiv has developed technology it believes could have as profound an effect on our relationship with the material world as anything since we began to use machines to improve our lives. Although this technology will first be seen next year in video games, the company is talking about extending its use to almost every aspect of our lives.

Emotiv is no fly-by-night outfit. Its founders include Allan Snyder, a renowned Australian neuroscientist. Randy Breen, the chief product officer, was previously head of development at LucasArts, the video games company of Star Wars director George Lucas.

The prototype headset has 16 sensors that attach to various points on the head so it can pick up the complex of electrical signals from the millions of neurons in the brain. If it sounds similar to an electroencephalogram (EEG) – the medical technique that measures the electrical activity of the brain – it is. But Emotiv has found a way of taking it out of the clinical setting and making it cheap enough for consumer use. Once the headset has read the brain’s signals, it feeds the information through a computer using algorithms developed by Emotiv and transforms those thoughts into actions.

To appreciate how revolutionary this is, think about how we interact with machines, from light switches to televisions to mobile phones to computers. Imagine being able to make these machines do what we want – turn them on or off, change a TV channel to one that suits our mood or choose which music we want to listen to on our iPods. “Our vision for the next generation of man-machine communication will not be limited to just conscious communication,” says Nam Do, co-founder and chief executive officer of Emotiv. “Nonconscious communication between man and machines will play a big part.”

For the moment, though, Emotiv is developing the technology for video gaming. There are two reasons. The first is that video gamers are early adopters of new technology and Emotiv is hoping they will help it spread. The second is that the Emotiv technology transforms the gaming experience into something almost magical: you can make things happen, move things, shoot things, kill people even, almost anything really, just by thinking about it.

Emotiv is developing three different applications. The first is called Expressiv. With this function if you wink, an avatar on the computer or video-game screen winks too. If you smile, she smiles; if you frown, she frowns. At the moment with video games, if you want an avatar to smile, you have to type in a symbol for smile. This will allow game players a far greater level of freedom – a bit like using a Nintendo Wii but with nothing in your hand.

The second function is called Affectiv. This measures the emotions, such as the level of excitement or calmness and represents these as a graph visible on the screen. Measuring this allows the game to respond to the emotion, for instance by ramping up the action if you appear to be bored.

The third is called Cognitiv, and it detects the conscious thoughts, which allows to move and manipulate objects on a screen, for instance pushing a cube away or making it rotate. It does this by taking a reading for 10 seconds of the brainwaves in a resting state, then for 10 seconds as I concentrate hard on making the cube do what you want. The more you repeat the process the more the computer learns and the easier it becomes.

The incredible thing is this: it works. When you put it to use in a Harry Potter video game adapted to take advantage of the technology, the effect is astounding. While you make Harry move by using a joystick, you can make him perform certain actions, like lifting a huge stone or throwing fire sticks, simply by thinking him to do it. It’s stunning.

“We’ve had 12-year-olds playing the game and they really think it’s magic,” says Le. “They really believe they are Harry Potter making these things happen.” CREDIT: The Sunday Times