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posted by martyb on Thursday August 31 2017, @06:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the get-jacked-in dept.

A Game You Can Control With Your Mind

When you pull the headset over your eyes and the game begins, you are transported to a tiny room with white walls. Your task is to break out of the room, but you cannot use your hands. There is no joystick or game pad. You must use your thoughts.

You turn toward a ball on the floor, and your brain sends a command to pick it up. With another thought, you send the ball crashing into a mirror, breaking the glass and revealing a few numbers scribbled on a wall. You mentally type those numbers into a large keypad by the door. And you are out.

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.

Incorporating a headset with virtual reality goggles and sensors that can read your brain waves, this prototype is a few years from the market. And it is limited in what it can do. You cannot select an object with your mind unless you first look in its general direction, narrowing the number of items you may be considering.

But it works. 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.

The prototype is among the earliest fruits of a widespread effort to embrace technology that was once science fiction — and in some ways still is. Driven by recent investments from the United States government and by the herd mentality that so often characterizes the tech world, a number of a start-ups and bigger companies like Facebook are working on ways to mentally control machines. They are also looking for smoother ways to use virtual reality technology.

"Neurotechnology has become cool," said Ed Boyden, a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at the M.I.T. Media Lab who advises one of those start-ups.

The article also discusses Elon Musk's company Neuralink.

Related: Elon Musk Launches Company to Link Your Brain to a Computer
Neuralink Aims to Market a Brain-Computer Interface Product Within 4 Years
Brain-Computer Interfaces Revolutionized Using Silicon Electronics
University Researchers Band Together to "Make Girls Moe"


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @05:45PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @05:45PM (#562219)

    has it.

    Was truly a wonder of technology at the time it came out, networking support for a Multiplayer battlezone, back when multiplayer gaming was still in its infancy on personal computing devices. I can't remember if it was limited to appletalk, ipx, tcp, or some other dead protocol though. It seems like those systems had both ethernet and appletalk connectors, the last before the switch to PCI and mainstream technology.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @07:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @07:48PM (#562277)

    The original Mac edition only supported AppleTalk, and I played it on an Ethernet which must have used AppleTalk Phase II over EtherTalk.

    I encountered Spectre during a college open house at a college I ended up not attending, and as I recall one of the student computer lab managers joined me in a multiplayer game and shot my tank. It was the one and only time I ever played Spectre against another human being.

    That one time playing Spectre is now a treasured memory of an experience which never happened again no matter how much I might wish it had. For me it was as significant as "that one time at band camp." But by the time I entered college, Doom was released and nobody cared for Spectre anymore.