14 DAY TRIAL // You saw this futuristic helmet in a ton of SciFi movies, you especially enjoyed it in the "Demolition Man" and you probably hoped to live the day when all this will be possible. Well, you might just get lucky - such a device that is able to read people's minds has been announced and is supposed to hit the market sometime next year!
This futuristic helmet will be called Epoc and will be developed by Emotiv Systems, after no less than five years of work and it is supposed to read a person's thoughts. This means that sometime in the future it will really be possible to control everything with your mind, from the simple light switch to the way the cursor moves on you computer screen.
Until then, the developers from Emotiv Systems claim that Epoc will allow players to visualize moves in their head and that move will be transmitted and replicated on the computer screen. This helmet relies on the fact that brainwaves appear every time a person thinks about something and Emotiv claim to have found a way of identifying the electrical patterns of different human desired actions. In other words, it will understand when a person wants to move his right hand forward and will "translate" this on the screen.
The helmet (that looks nothing like a helmet, since it has a few "arms" to be positioned on one's head) has 16 sensors smartly positioned on the arms so they can pick the electric signals up. Then, a software analyzes these signals, translates them and forwards them to a receiver. A total of 12 moves are said to be recognized by the helmet and, therefore, used in video games.
Even though all these sound really crazy and pure fiction, it seems that Emotiv Systems might be right, as director of the Center for Advanced Biomedical Imaging at University College London claims: "Although I think this device can apparently do the things that it claims, I wonder if it works in the way that it says it does." Basically, it means that Epoc might be able to understand some simple moves like hand movement and such, but would probably fail in the quest of actually reading somebody's mind. But since everything is speculation until now, we just have to wait and see the mind-reading helmet at work, sometime in 2008.