Thought control: it's the computer world's latest game plan

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,” he told The Times in an exclusive interview.

“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.

Despite widespread scepticism, pre-release tests have suggested that the technology works. “This is the tip of the iceberg for what is possible,” said Tan Le, another of Emotiv's co-founders, during a recent press demonstration. “There will be a convergence of gesture-based technology and the brain as a new interface - the Holy Grail is the mind.”

Mr Iwata, in Los Angeles for the video games industry's annual E3 conference, is credited with a revolution of the video games industry with his Wii remote, many of which have been hurled at television screens or living-room walls after overenthusiastic players lost their grip amid virtual tennis tournaments or boxing rounds. He did not comment on Emotiv's headset but said he believed that fully thought-controlled games were still years away: “We don't have that kind of technology right now, but when we're talking about a 20-year time period, anything's possible.

“If you look back 20 years from today, things that were thought impossible are now the reality - for example, it was a distant dream that we would construct a 3D world with computer graphics.”

The US military has been working on thought-control technology for years. Most of the projects that it has made public, however, have focused on thought-reading systems rather than, say, thought-guided missiles.

Last month the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), an arm of the US Defence Department, said it had awarded a $6.7 million contract to Northrop Grumman to develop “brainwave binoculars”. The binoculars use scalp-mounted sensors to detect objects the user might have seen but not noticed - in other words, the computer is used as a kind of brain-aid, giving the user superhuman vision.

source http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/gadgets_and_gaming/article4354041.ece