Inside Mindset, a computer game harnessing brainwaves

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Mindset is on exhibit at the Tokyo Game Show, and it’s sure to get some deep interest from the top end of the computer industry.

The Sydney Morning Herald:

The Mindset monitors whether the player is focused or relaxed and accordingly moves the character on a personal computer.

"We brought this to the game show as a new interface, a new platform for game creators," NeuroSky managing director Kikuo Ito told AFP.

Children's games using the system will hit the US market next year, Ito said.
"We are exploring the use of brain waves in the game industry because games are fun and so close to people," he said.

What’s so significant about this is that the computer/human interface can be explored a lot more effectively. That, in turn, generates a lot of useful information for future advances.

The human brain is a supercomputer, and far more efficient than the machine version. The interaction with Mindset will produce some pretty strong indications how the brain reacts to the computer. Games are big users of intellect and reaction times, and players will have to work with the computer responses. How they overcome the limitations of a computer will be a real research project, by any standards.

The difficulty is that brain reactions will be limited by the computer code. Computer game play only allows so much. Imagine World of Warcraft using brainwaves. The level of complexity, and the whole concept of the game, are very high, and the need for working relationships between the player and the computer would be extremely difficult to work out.

Not impossible, though. Mindset could be a big boost for computer science, allowing multilevel logic and perhaps even a self writing code so the computer can do what it’s being told to do, if it’s outside existing code. That’s a huge possible leap in technological concepts, and as a practical bit of science, it has a lot to recommend it.

It could, in fact, revolutionize the whole idea of computers.

My only criticism of NeuroSky is that the publicity for this very significant bit of hardware isn’t strong. News is hard to find. They’re sitting on a goldmine, if they can get this working. There’s still a lot of hard slog in code, and this could be the Rosetta Stone for future computer languages. Code could be written in seconds, not years. They need to tell someone about it, get a profile, and make some splashes in the industry. There’ll be no lack of interest.