The UK is the first to receive prototypes of a new way to game: with your mind. How does it work? Basically, Brainwave allows you to control a game via a headset that translates your brain’s electrical activity into a language your game console can understand.
The simplified explanation is that the brain communicates and thinks things things through using neurons – electrical pulses shooting from one part of the brain to another to transmit a thought or command. The neuro-headset “reads” this activity and sends those signals down into the controls for the game you are playing.
This should take gaming to a whole new level. Being able to send a game signals as soon as you have an intuition or impulse, or to wait until you have thought a situation through will eliminate response time and make game play much more personal and unique. The technique behind the innovation is Electrencephalography, or EEG for short.
In the past, reading electric impulses and signals via EEG has required a bulky net of electrodes and wires, direct skin contact and a goopy gel in order to work. Now technology has advanced enough to do away with the need to shave your head, wear an electrode and wire hair net or cover yourself in nasty gel.
Being able to use technology this advanced without all of the inconvenient trappings of the past will have applications beyond the gaming world. Think of what this could mean fro everything from flight to sports, or even working. If I could put words on paper as fast as I thought them my “novel in progress” that I write in my spare time would have been done long before now and already on to the rejection phase.
Are you a gamer? Do you eagerly anticipate not only this innovation, but the next level: implanted nano technology and beyond? Will you snap one of the up as soon as they commercially available where you are? Or do you fear this new technology an worry what it will do to our society?
