DON'T you wish your video game could follow your mental instructions on-screen instead of you having to use the mouse, joystick or keyboard to play along? That's precisely what the future of gaming is – and the future is only months away. A new headset system has been developed that picks up electrical activity from the brain, as well as from facial muscles and other spots, and translates it into on-screen commands. This lets players move mountains not with a click, but with a thought. Cool! The headset is made by Emotiv Systems in San Francisco. It captures electrical signals when you concentrate; then the computer processes these signals and pairs a screen action with them. Emotiv plans to have its noninvasive, wireless EPOC headset on sale in time at the year-end, for $299 (SR1,121), The New York Times reported. The technology has been around for a while, used in hospitals for electroencephalography, or EEG, that picks up electrical signals from the scalp's surface and converts them to actions that control or enhance what happens on screen. For gaming, a chip inside the headset collects the signals and sends them wirelessly to a receiver plugged into a USB port of the computer, where most of the processing occurs. A less sophisticated version of this headset has just been released in the United States by OCZ Technology Group in Sunnyvale, Calif. Called the Neural Impulse Actuator ($169 or SR664)), it has three sensors in a headband that pick up electrical activity primarily from muscles and convert it into commands. Players of shooting games, for instance, may use eye movement to trigger a shot, shaving milliseconds off of their response time and sparing their hands. It all sounds cool, but are we going to hit some point when, just like how it happened with cell phones, the alarm sounds on what all this could be doing to your brain?
