Brain-controlled gaming system falls into 'demo hell'
It wasn't supposed to happen like this.
Emotiv Systems threw a
press conference in San Francisco this week to show the latest enhancements
to its futuristic gaming system, which lets players control objects on the screen
using only their thoughts.
When it works it can be impressive. The system is based on a "neuroheadset"
fitted with about a dozen sensors that read tiny electrical impulses that are
emitted by the brain when a person thinks. It learns to recognize the impulses
and interpret thoughts like "up," "down" and "rotate"
and translate them onto the screen.
On Tuesday evening the lights dimmed in a packed auditorium at the Sony Metreon
theater and for a few moments everything went fine. An employee donned the headset
and made facial expressions -- smiles, winks -- that were reflected on the face
of an animated robot on a large screen. The employee rotated a three-dimensional
cube on the screen and moved it forward.
Then he tried to make it disappear. Then he tried again. Feet shuffled uncomfortably
in the auditorium. "Can you make it disappear?" CEO Nam Do asked hopefully.
Someone in the audience coughed. "Shall we move on?" Do asked. "I
think we'll move on to the next thing." Then the cube disappeared. The
auditorium erupted into applause, either from excitement or relief.
Then came the demonstration of an actual game. Zachary Drake, Emotiv's game
developer, built the crowd's expectations. "This," he said scornfully,
brandishing a wireless game controller, "this is a wonderful thing, and
it does some things really well ... but lifting an object with your mind just
leaves this thing behind."
That's when things went really wrong. The neuroheasdset didn't work, so Drake
had to use the wireless controller he had scorned a few moments ago to navigate
through the game. (The controller is also part of Emotiv's system, it turns
out, and supplements use of the headset.) The controller didn't work very well
either, however.
"Can you please switch off any wireless transmitters you may be using
because right now we can't even get the wireless controller to work," Do
asked the audience. But it was too late.
"Welcome to demo hell, folks," Drake said.
It was an unfortunate night for Emotiv, which has demonstrated the system successfully
at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and at other venues. It worked fine
during set-up on Tuesday afternoon, Do said.
He said later that the demonstration had been disrupted by the wireless audio-visual
equipment used by lighting and sound crews at the event, which operates on the
same 2.4GHz frequency as its game system. The AV equipment uses a high-power,
frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum technology not found in consumer devices
or home wireless set-ups, a spokeswoman added.
Emotiv's system doesn't actually "read" a person's thoughts. Instead
it looks at patterns of electrical impulses generated by the various parts of
the brain and figures out what they correspond to based on patterns it has learned.
It can also gauge a person's mood, according to Emotiv, and adjust the difficulty
of a game when a player gets frustrated.
The system will go on sale in time for this year's holiday shopping season
for US$299, Do said. The company said it will work with all PC games and console
platforms.
The underlying technology is known as non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG)
and has been around for many years. An Austrian company called g.tec
showed a system at Cebit last year designed mostly for scientific and medical
use. It features an ungainly rubber cap with wires protruding from it, and could
be used to type words or move a cursor on a screen.
Emotiv's contribution is what it calls "the world's first consumer neuroheadset,"
which uses its own wireless sensor technology. It has also released a software
development kit that it hopes will be used use to build applications. The
headset could be used with instant messaging software, for example, to express
emotions without needing emoticons, Do said.
"You should come try it at our booth at the Game Developers Conference,"
he told the audience Tuesday. "Then you'll see it really works and we're
not lying."
IDG News Service
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