Back in the early 90s virtual reality was the future. You couldn’t turn around without seeing Jaron Lanier and his crazy cyber-future glove. Timothy Leary, Wired magazine, Mondo 2000, the print version of Boing Boing, Whole Earth Review, there wasn’t a hipster in the land who didn’t know that VR was just around the corner and it was going to change everything. Developers just needed a few years to work out the kinks.
A few days ago twitter-land noted that a tweet had been sent using a brain-computer interface (BCI). That’s right, using only thoughts and software a man was able to send the message – “USING EEG TO SEND TWEET.”
New Scientist has a brief article if you want to learn more.
In my old blog I followed the development of BCI pretty closely. If I were still keeping it I would be posting a round-up of reaction to that tweet, I would have blogged about Asimo the robot being controlled by a BCI. I would probably send New Scientist a gentle correction reminding them not to leave out Honda and Hitachi when talking about brain game developers.
But, when I saw that NS was pointing to Emotiv, and that their release of a gaming BCI input device is still sometime in the ill-defined future, I got a little bit of deja vu. These gadgets are already a few years behind schedule, and at this point I’m starting to wonder if we’ll ever see them as a popular item for gamers.
They have a real and legitimate use for the disabled, and seem to be gaining some traction there, just as VR did with architects and surgeons. But, I’m starting to doubt I’ll ever get my chance to play brain pong.
