Matrix, here we come

March 7, 2007

We’ve had wires used to connect the brain to the PC, most celebratedly Kevin Warwick’s. We’ve recently seen a report of a wire being made out of neurons. Now we have an EEG skullcap – to be used for video games. And while all three are, variously, primitive and experimental, the message is plain as a pikestaff to anyone with the eyes to see: the brain-machine divide is morphing into an interface, and an interface unmediated by us and our senses.

To use Emotiv’s system, a person puts on the EEG cap and adjusts it to her head, making sure that most of the sensors touch the scalp. The system automatically picks up blinks and emotional states. However, in order to move virtual objects, such as a box on a computer screen, a person must go through a series of training sessions in which she concentrates for about 10 seconds on mentally moving the box. Tan Le, one of Emotiv’s cofounders, says that there is a large amount of machine learning built into the software, so the more a person concentrates on a specific task, the more precisely the system follows the mental instructions.