Scientists Have Players Play Doom Using Their Minds

October 23, 2011 - 11:07pm

During this week's Emerging Technology Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one researcher presented a video of a guy playing the original Doom game using his brain waves.

To be more precise, the player used a joystick to move around, but he used his mind only to fire the gun.

"What I'm here to tell you is that this is not science fiction. This is an emerging reality," Wadsworth Center research scientist Gerwin Schalk said.

The player's (and other test subjects') alpha brain waves were captured through medical devices that were already wired to their brains as part of their treatment of illnesses such as epilepsy.

Comments

lame.

Using brainwaves to perfom a single, super-simple action on an external device?

Pfft, that shit was done in the 50's.

I'm 100% looking forward to plugging games into our brains to achieve full (ish) integration.

OK

There is a point where you say, maybe this is as far as we should go with this sort of technology. If this got perfected and fell into the wrong hands, Imagine the chaos. Not saying there are no benefits to this technology; for example, this would be best used for amputees, now THAT would be awesome and beneficial. But face it, we haven't learnt how to live as people yet. This could go south real fast, I'm actually worried.

Why would you be worried?, do

Why would you be worried?, do you know how difficult it is to use your brainwaves just to fire a weapon in a game?
it not like they are reading minds (which would also be cool). As far as being in the wrong hands, America would be considered "the wrong hands" by many. Its not actually a big leap, this stuff has been here for a while, you can still make the gun shoot even if you didn't think about shooting the gun, its like blowing into an ipod to play a digital flute, you dont have to blow into it, you can yell to and the flute will make noise. so until i can telepathically communicate to my pet robot to get me a beer from the fridge, there's really nothing to worry about.

Mindset, Nuerosky, Emotive, etc.

Just look up BCI devices. There is actually a few out there that are designed for the home user. They have dry sensors, so you don't need to have a solution in-between the sensor and your head. You can set up different brain waves to function similar to the pull triggers in the Xbox 360 controllers. Different states of mind raise or lower the value. You can then map when a value goes over X value, press Y Key. Thus you can play any game with your mind, though as there is a delay to process your thoughts, it's best to play slower pace games or map to game functions that don't require quick reactions.

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