Emotiv And Robotics

A new wave of mind control will be upon us soon, this time for the end user!

We have seen the WiiMote bring greater levels of human input to gaming in a huge scale (over 29.62 million Wii units sold at the time of writing). The Wii also brought down the cost of this technology so more people could buy it. The Nintendo DS (NDS) and Apple iPhone brought touchscreens to the mainstream.

So why not take game control to the next level? Emotiv is doing just that, mind control for PC games. I first saw this new interface device back in early 2008 thinking it would be amazing if brought in the real world. My idea was to interface this with a Windows program for remote controlling a NXT robot. If a success, interfacing it with a humanoid robot.

In the last week I have been playing with the SDK to great success! The “EmoKey” program can link different thoughts, emotions, or facial motion to input key commands to your Windows PC which I can then use to control a robot. Sadly the Emotiv EPOC costs $299 (USD), a bit much for what I’d be doing… I did not even know *if* this would work for physical objects (what I am trying to do) up until a few days ago! I was watching a recording of the Discovery’s new show “Prototype This!” where the team built cars that would shut off if the builder gets angry (which also triggered for excitement). There was a beautiful test where they bent a spoon by “pushing” with their mind at the spoon, sending input to the computer, then sending an articular a message to pull on the spoon (seen below).

You can see the full episode on the Discovery website until January 15, 2009.

Video of early beta:

Public release is set for Christmas 2008!

Will this make PC gaming cooler? Will mind control be successful? Will Nintendo fight back? Where will this next gen technology be going next?

Emotiv Demo

Emotiv