It’s not like EEG is breakthrough technology. We’ve been able to read the electrical activity of the brain for quite some time, but the clever folks at IEEE are thinking up new and creative ways to leverage those read-outs into something a bit more fun.
The new Emotiv headsets are able to read your brain when it’s just chilling, and then calibrate for a specific action. In our case, we calibrated for racing two little cars. Once we imagined driving the little cars down the track, it was time to race.
For me, it worked. I imagined the car driving down the track, and so it drove. Darrell had a bit more trouble, probably because he was thinking about Apple products the whole time.
The headsets are clunky, because they have to be, but if they could change the form-factor to something more realistically useable, the applications are endless. You could think your lights on and off, think your coffee pot to brew, think your TV to change the channel, etc.