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Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Brainwaves Make Lousy Demos

I can see why the always excellent MAKE would find this interesting - it's pretty nifty when it comes to just pure gadgetry. I don't see why the gaming industry would care though:



I was like thinking that I had to be thinking about my thoughts and stuff. OK, sure, the kid's like seven and I'm thinking that I should be thinking that maybe he didn't take his ritalin or sometihng. These interfaces keep getting kicked around but keep missing the fact it's hard enough to make controllers with the kind of precision gamers need these days. Last night I died in a small pool of lava because the Wavebird knockoff we use for GameCube games decided to take a quick break. Would it be better to if could have thought about my momentary state of non-calmness to float? I mean, these things just register brainwaves and then report the to the computer. It's actually not that revolutionary nor useful - brainwaves don't actually have that many dimensions of information to them. Basically this is like being in a sleep study, but shoved in front of a monitor.

Until they can show a demo of a game that actually looks like a game ... I'll keep shaking my head at these. Nintendo has done far more with cheap electronics and a pair of IR beams.

1 comment:

Patrick said...

Furthermore, BCIs are much more likely to be used to surveil and control people than they are to empower people, because one-directional interactions are an order of magnitude easier to massage at a mass scale. Watch this space though, it has far more implications for reality becoming like a game than for games themselves.

Did you know that invasive BCI research (brain chips, ect.) are almost exclusively located in North America (which pretty much means the USA).