First came the joystick. Then came the motion-sensing Wii remote. Now get ready for another radical and rather unsettling leap in video games technology: thought control.
Satoru Iwata, the president and chief executive of Nintendo – which is expected to sell about 25million units of its successful Wii video games console this financial year – has no doubts about the next gaming boom. “As soon as we think something in our brain, it will appear within a video game,”
“You’ll probably need to wear some kind of hat or helmet or something.”
As far-fetched as it sounds, Mr Iwata’s claim – which brings to mind the plot of Craig Thomas’s bestselling 1977 novel Firefox, about a mind-reading Soviet fighter aircraft – is already coming true: the world’s first thought-controlled game is expected to be launched by the Sydney company Emotiv by the end of this year.
Co-founded by Allan Snyder, a neuroscientist and former University of Cambridge research fellow, Emotiv says its EPOC headset features 16 sensors that push against the player’s scalp to measure electrical activity in the brain – a process known as electro-encephalography. In theory, this allows the player to spin, push, pull, and lift objects on a computer monitor, simply by thinking.
- Similar posts
- Nintendo 3DS set for March release in Europe (42.8%)
- Cyberbike game due for the Wii (28.7%)
- FDA Pulls Darvon and Darvocet (23.6%)
- National health service endorses Nintendo Wii Fit plus (19.2%)
- Wii Sports Summer Resort (16.9%)
