THOUGHT CONTROLLED VIRTUAL REALITY

When you pull the headset over your eyes, 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 gamepad. 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... You are out! Neurable, a small company founded by Ramses Alcaide, who is an electrical engineer and neuroscientist, designed the game. It offers a computer mouse for the mind. It provides a way of selecting items in a virtual world with your thoughts. The game incorporates 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, and this narrows the number of items you may consider to select. 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. With the recent investments of the U.S government, some startup companies, and bigger ones like Facebook, are also working on ways to mentally control machines. They are also looking for smoother ways to use virtual reality technology. The Neurable prototype shows what is possible today. Using electroencephalography, or EEG, which is a means of measuring electrical brain activity, the company can provide simple ways of mentally interacting with a game. Some companies hope to go much further and want to build ways of performing nearly any computing task with the mind. Imagine a brain interface for rapidly typing on a smartphone!