Hmm. I’m so trained to be skeptical of techno-utopian talk, that I have often wondered whether I’ll be fundamentally unable to appreciate when a substantive and consequential technological change actually occurs. Luckily, I still also have a rich supply of techno-fetishism, where new gewgaw gadgets thrill me in a way that wants me desperately to forget that technologies don’t, in fact, change the world.

So, with the caveat that this might be me getting intellectually gooey about what could just be a snazzy new toy, I have to say I’m pretty bowled over by this. Machinist at Salon has a sneak preview of a new gaming headset coming from Emotiv, that reads EEG brainwaves as input for the game experience. Apparently this device is going to be on the consumer market this year, for $299. I highly recommend reading the post, and watching the following video, which is Emotiv’s product demo.


There’s been a series of research successes recently where scientists have been able to train chimps to control a video game with their brains — but these have involved implanting chips to read brain activity more directly than an outside sensor can. But Machinist, who got to play with the headset and the game that comes with it swears that it works, and is great fun.

Of course, the implications I could dream up feel intriguing at the start, but wither a bit with analysis. Here, the things you can “pick up with your mind” are virtual objects, digital boulders and trees in a gamespace. But as this technology progresses, it would be easy to imagine the input going to a mechanical device that actually manipulates the physical world. Of course, we already seem pretty capable at moving physical objects with the kinds of technologies that don’t need brain input, that only need a “joystick” — i.e. the bulldozer, the shovel, the simple lever. OK, but the manipulation of digital information with such a means is intriguing, beyond the video game context, if the sensor can distinguish between increasingly complex and subtle commands: not just “move” or “run” but “file this under documents” or “email this to Jeff”. Still, we can do this quite well with our fingers, even with voices.

I’m not an expert in HCI, but it seems that the bottleneck that input devices typically represent (the computer / machine only knows what we want in terms of what we input, and the input device — keyboard, joystick, mouse, Wii-mote — only lets certain information in) only matters when (a) more subtle information can’t get through, or (b) the input mechanism itself is unwieldy or disruptive to the activity. So until a brainwave sensor can get more from us than the input mechanisms we currently have, it’s a novelty, except for those moments or users for which we can’t perform other kinds of input activities — which is why I imagine this innovation will very interesting to the disabled community.

So I can’t quite explain why this strikes me as important, beyond its novelty and its specific applications for entertainment and for the disabled. But I have often wondered what innovation will be the next means around which social and cultural relationships change, which thing our kids will do that really will finally just seem foreign to us. Maybe this is the remnants of my techno-fetishism hiding behind my intellectual commitment to question determinist fantasies.