Now YOU can use the Force

[Ender]

link

Think you’re strong with the Force? Pretty soon, you’ll be able to find out.

USAToday.com just posted a story about an upcoming licensed toy that literally uses brain waves to “reach out with your feelings” and move an object. Here’s an excerpt:

The Force Trainer (expected to be priced at $90 to $100) comes with a headset that uses brain waves to allow players to manipulate a sphere within a clear 10-inch-tall training tower, analogous to Yoda and Luke Skywalker’s abilities in the Star Wars films.

No, you’re not tapping into some “all-powerful force controlling everything,” as Han Solo said in the movies. But you are reaching out with mind power via one of the first mass-market brain-to-computer products. “It’s been a fantasy everyone has had, using The Force,” says Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing.

Now, if we could just find a Force toy that lifts the economy…

Check out the full article here.

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*shits self*

A fucking BRAIN WAVE controlled TOY?

Fuck, I had lincoln logs and the standard yellow blue red legos growing up. Now kids get toys they control with their fucking minds? What the shit?

[Sarevok]

Star Wars toys just get better with time don't they ? I still remember how excited I was when I saw Star Wars in lego format. Kids now get even cooler toys to play with.

[Starglider]

mmmyeah. Let's hope it works better than the 1984 equivalent. The tech for this is slowly getting better but still I'm skeptical of a $100 toy doing it well.

[Solauren]

Brainwaves my ass end.

That's going to work on pulse and thermal readings, AT BEST.

[Bounty]

Brainwaves my ass end.

That's going to work on pulse and thermal readings, AT BEST.

In the Force Trainer, a wireless headset reads your brain activity, in a simplified version of EEG medical tests, and the circuitry translates it to physical action. If you focus well enough, the training sphere, which looks like a ping-pong ball, will rise in the tower.

"Until today, EEG technology has been designed for rigorous medical and clinical applications with little regard to price (and) ease of use," says Greg Hyver of NeuroSky, which developed the brain-wave technology for both games. "We are putting this exciting technology into everyone's living room."

So unless he's outright lying, it's quite a bit more than "pulse and thermal readings at best".

mmmyeah. Let's hope it works better than the 1984 equivalent.

Well, it's setting the bar lower in terms of interface complexity; Atari tried to turn muscle activity into precise controls, this however seems more like a simple binary operation (calm = rise, not calm = drop).

[Kodiak]

I had a relevant comment to this thread explaining how a BCI (Brain-Control Interface) works that got moved to the HoS with the kung-fu debacle. I'll re-post it here in the interest of continuing a discussion on this new technology:

Wow, it's been a while since I've seen this stuff. Let me explain to you how this gizmo worked back when I worked at Neurosky. I was with the company for a year as an intern and worked on the development of demonstration products to show companies why they should put EEG sensors in their products. The set-up relies on a dry sensor which sets firmly on the forehead and has ground and reference sensors on each ear (you could do them both on the same ear, but we couldn't get the noise filtered out right). What the active sensor does is monitor the frequency of your brain waves and runs them through a processing algorithm to do a fast-fourier transform. This gives a frequency sampling. As was shown by the R&D teams in Russia and Korea, the harder you concentrate, the higher your brain wave frequency (more non-copyright info here). All that remained then was to amplify this signal into a control signal and do something useful with it.

We had 1 "toy" where we attached a controller to a lightsaber (the boss was really obsessed w/ starwars) and you could set a threshold to turn it on by concentrating at a certain level. Another application was a robot that would move faster the more you concentrated (this was my senior project). Also, the software team developed a videogame demo using the half-life engine where you could run around a virtual arena and lob benches, cars, and watermelons at eachother.

The biggest problem we had was getting a one-size-fits-all range for sensing as well as for fit of the interface, which it looks like Mattel has figured out (I remember putting together software kits for them about 2 years ago). In other words- it DOES sense brain waves, it IS for real, and it is NOT about pulse rates or anything like that (though the one we had picked up the signal from eye-blinking as a HUGE spike). I'm glad to answer any questions people have about this and what IMHO it can and can't do.

[General Zod]

I remember reading about this awhile back. I might just pick one up once they hit the market.

[Samurai Rafiki]

Speaking of Star Wars inspiring cool toys, I'll hold off on using the force to move a ball around if someone would just give me an estimate as to how long its going to take for someone to develop a lightsaber game for the wii where the saber follows the remote rather than just a random swing turning into a pre-programmed maneuver. I mean, my friends and I have already submitted that any and all disputes can be resolved with a round of SSBB, but how much more valid would the results be with an actual sword fight?

[FOG3]

It looks like it's just a system pulling readings to control the throttle setting on the fan in the bottom, especially with the description. I'll stick with the weighted pendulum.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I tried Kodiak's headset when he brought it home, it was really neat. I was able to hit maximum output for 'concentration' state of mind, which was neat.