A Game You Can Control With Your Mind

A Game You Can Control With Your Mind
“We look at specific brain signals,” Mr. Alcaide said, “and once we understand them, we can use them.”
When you play the game, the same light bounces around the virtual room.
Using electroencephalography, or EEG — a means of measuring electrical brain activity
that has been around for decades — the company can provide simple ways of mentally interacting with a game.
Designed by Neurable, a small start-up founded by Ramses Alcaide, an electrical engineer
and neuroscientist, the game offers what you might call a computer mouse for the mind, a way of selecting items in a virtual world with your thoughts.
Using computer algorithms based on research that Mr. Alcaide originally published as a doctoral student at the University
of Michigan, Neurable works to read activity with a speed and accuracy that is not usually possible.
I recently played the game, which has the working title Awakening, when Mr. Alcaide
and two Neurable employees passed through San Francisco, and a few hundred others tried it this month at the Siggraph computer graphics conference in Los Angeles.
A pulse of light bounces around the virtual room, and each time it hits a small colored ball in front of you, you think about the ball.
Neurable’s prototype uses virtual reality goggles from HTC, a consumer electronics company,
and seven EEG sensors placed at specific spots around your head.
Incorporating a headset with virtual reality goggles and sensors that can read your brain waves, this prototype is a few years from the market.