Controlling Games With Your Thoughts Becomes a Reality

Controlling your avatar with your thoughts is soon to be reality thanks to a neuro-headset created by Emotiv Systems. The company showed off its prototype this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and is hoping to release it by the end of the year.

According to the BBC, Tan Le, president of Emotiv, said the headset picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer. It is made up of several sensors that can pickup on the wearer's thoughts and expressions to make gameplay a lot more interesting, since gamers will have to work a little harder at hiding their emotions.

Apparently, the headset can detect more than 30 different emotions that include excitement, tension, frustration, meditation, as well as facial expressions such as a wink, a smile, anger, shock, and laughter. It also picks up on cognitive action such as pulling, pushing, and rotating objects (thanks to a gyroscope attached to the headset) allowing gamers to move objects in their virtual world.

The gaming headset will initially be available to consumers for $299 later this year along with a game, but Emotiv and IBM are exploring other uses for the headset that would go beyond video gaming. Sounds like a very promising gaming accessory, but we'll just have to wait and see it to believe it.