I Wrote This Post With My Mind (I Wish).

Looking back on those ridiculous old-timey predictions of the future is becoming increasingly surreal. Five years ago I would laugh at their naiveté, but recently it's become more humorous how much progress has actually been made towards those visions (FaceTime anyone?). Strides in AI have rendered movies like “Her” something that could be described as a relevant comedy. Machine learning has made Facebook more apt than us at recognizing human faces; something bred into our very neural circuitry.

I had the pleasure of installing a floppy disk drive for the very William Kahan today. He explained to me the technical limitations of his day which led to delightfully hacky quirks such as the shameless twist in a floppy drive IDA cable (a remnant of the A-B hard drive configuration of old Intel computers, apparently). It all sounded so much more makeshift than it is today. I couldn't help but think: “it's a pretty chill time to be alive.”

While that's all well and good, we're not going to talk about lame things like life-saving medicine, unbelievably powerful mobile phones, or automated cars. We're talking about the real important stuff: videogames.

On the advent of the Oculus Rift, Omni, Leap Motion, it's pretty safe to say that it's an awesome time to be a game developer. It's a kind of “wild west” situation that we haven't seen since the dawn of 3D-graphics. The excitement is obviously well earned, and will usher in a freaking awesome phase of immersive entertainment. Of course, you've heard this all before.

Something's missing. Those old-timey predictions never included us swiveling around in a chair with an awkward looking headset on, mouth agape like we're trying to attract a family of meerkats (they stick their head in your mouth to smell you; you didn't know that?). What did movies like Tron predict about our virtual reality future? What's the final frontier? Simple: full mental immersion. No controllers, no physical limitations, just a headset and a transplantation of our consciousness into the virtual world.

Don't get me wrong. We're very close to insanely deep immersion with things like the Oculus, and not so close to the Tron reality. That being said, there's no reason why we can't start trying to reach it.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of participating in the Intel Wearable Games Hackathon in San Francisco. There I got to play with the new Galileo (it seriously sucks and that's all I say about that) and do what I love to do: make games. I was persuaded to go by my friend John, who's a cognitive-science major here at UC-Berkeley. We had been playing around with Arduinos, and John had been looking into EEG hacks. We took a crappy Mindflex headset he had soldered to an Arduino and decided it would be pretty sweet to base a game off of it.

John suggested a mind-controlled Tetris variant, which would have been an awesome modification to my Tetrocity project, however we ended up going with a more realistic vision of making a Warioware style game in which the player is prompted with a series of quick challenges, which we would tailor to the EEG. We eventually stuck a few more sensors on there, like a heart-rate monitor and pressure sensor, as an attempt to create a game around the mastery of your biosensory data. We called it the Mind Body Fitness Challenge.

Unfortunately the build wasn't very well documented. There's source code on my Github which isn't very interesting. It worked okay past some Galileo setbacks and the inherent poor quality of the Mindflex headset. What was really surprising was the amount of interest it generated. We were invited to present our project at the Intel 2014 GDC, and even to an incubator for the sake of turning the project into a real product. A few days ago we were invited to host a booth at a health fair. Like I said before: this thing barely even works.

Brain-based virtual reality isn't some far fetched pipe dream for loony futurists anymore. Technology has reached the point of absurd innovation that what was once reserved for the fantasy realm of Tron is capable of generating real interest, because it's actually possible. Or at the very least, it seems like it could be.

Neurohacking is very much in its infant stages. A new group on my campus is dedicated to cognitive technology and finding uses for the slew of new, powerful EEG headsets hitting the market like the Emotiv. It's a weird experience. There's so many applications, but nobody has really touched it yet. It's like a gold mine for inventors. For example, my friend John wants to change the way we test for impairment by using brain waves themselves instead of secondary indicators. Others want to track your circadian rhythm throughout the day so you can optimize your sleep schedule. I want to control videogames with my mind.

Imagine the layer of depth that could be added to a game like Amnesia. Imagine running for your life, scrambling into a hiding spot and trying like hell to calm down because the monster can smell your fear from the EEG and track you down. Imagine manipulating an entire game world so that your friend can literally explore your mind-scape (credit to my friend Niko for that idea). It's all very very cool.

Is any of that currently possible? Well, no. EEGs are very limited in what they read, and extracting meaningful information from them is a salty experience at best. Not to mention, they're way too expensive for commercial use. But, wasn't the same thing said of visual virtual reality 3 years ago? Now everybody is jumping on that bandwagon. Interest is what pushes industries forward.

There's clearly interest in neurohacking, so why isn't it a more popular sector of VR? Most likely because there isn't a tangible experience out there that's fueled by it. The technology simply isn't good enough. It's an awkward situation. To generate interest, you need to show that it has power. To show that it has power, you need the technology. To get the technology, you need interest. It really makes you appreciate the difficulties and risk faced by companies like Oculus.

I think neurohacking itself will eventually overcome the hump by hackers taking advantage of the Emotivs of the industry. Once we can show that even a primitive EEG can change the way we interface with technology in a deep and fundamental way, the technological innovation will explode. Maybe that application lies in videogames, maybe it doesn't. Either way, I'll certainly be trying my best.

The big question to ask is whether or not neuro-based technology is even worth bothering with at all right now. If we're some unknown distance away from viable, consumer-grade neurofeedback technology, then shouldn't we just ignore it until it actually happens? I would say no. Current EEGs are noisy and inconsistent, but we don't need to build technologies around current EEGs. If we accept that EEGs will approach some arbitrary degree of accuracy, then why not just build around that assumption? The only risk we run is that assumption proving false, which the very development of the technology will prevent.

Stay tuned for my brain-wave based survival horror game, Epinephrine. ETA: *cough cough*