Gadgetory

we're going over to hack Manhattan which is like a hacker space to open up in the city maybe six months ago and they've built something they call brain bats four sons they call it brain Kong you we're basically like these headsets that monitor your brainwave activity and they can monitor two states like concentrated or like focused on something or like meditative like focused on nothing and that controls the little paddle and you're just playing you know like your classic 70s arcade version of palm I mean that's like really kind of you know my like long-term fantasy is that that's where computers are headed some kind of mind control some kind of brain computer interface so I got to like train my brain now to be ready for the for the singularity brain bats started off with David Rives one of the members of hack Manhattan came up with a sketch to do brain pong and I saw him using it one day and I was fact that I was really exciting I mean I really love the idea of being able to control things with your brainwaves and I just thought this was like this incredible new interface idea the way that the game works as we set it up here is that you wear the EEG headset and the EEG headset calculates two values your attention and a value for meditation so what we do is we take that attention value and so that's how much you're focusing on concentrating on a particular thing and it could be anything and I do math problems in my head if your attention level is higher than fifty percent which is sort of an arbitrary number but it has to be it has to be higher than that fifty percent in order for your paddle to move so in order to beat the computer you have to maintain a very high level of focus for the duration of the game it seems to me like if I'm trying if I'm like trying in my head just to speak in Spanish that my attention score was really high math doesn't seem to work at all but like translating one thought into another language seems to be pretty good for for the attention score vs and meditations for and just like focusing really hard on the computer I'm like trying to figure out why why my brain is working one way versus another but really this is I have no idea what's going on I mean like the meditation of the attention are just kind of like they're going back and forth battling games are one of the first means of exposure that children have to technology it's an area where you know there's playfulness there's financing and so it's an ideal incubator for new technology in interfaces and new ideas about ways to to interact with computerized devices it's not about setting out to do the greatest X or the greatest y that the world has ever seen it's about doing the greatest whatever happens to spontaneously occur because innovation can't be predicted and we ain't it to innovate