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Wednesday 4 May 2011
This Is Your Brain on iPhone

The Los Angeles Times reports that a developer from Iceland, MindGames, has put out two apps in the Apple App Store that rely on the user’s brain activity. In the most recent game, W.I.L.D., which was released last month, gamers perform a variety of tasks—they wander through dreamlike landscapes, extinguish fires, and even (with an apparent nod to The Matrix) bend spoons.

Prior to W.I.L.D., MindGames had put out a game called Tug of Mind. The game sounds like a cheeky joke, but is actually being billed as a relaxation tool: users upload a headshot (“of an ex-boyfriend, say, or a mother-in-law,” helpfully suggests the Times), and the photo morphs into a devilish looking 3-D avatar. The avatar hurls curses at you—using any pre-recorded message of your choosing—and the challenge becomes to soothe the avatar by remaining calm yourself.

Each game runs $4.99 in the App Store, but there’s one catch: you’ll also need to buy a brain wave-reading headset, which tend to run something on the order of $100. Companies like PLX and Neurosky offer such devices.

The technology is, at heart, very similar to electroencephalograph, or EEG, machines that doctors have used to diagnose neurological disorders for years. Users report a sense of disbelief when they find that apps or games can, with the help of a little headset, essentially read their minds. “I thought in no way is that going to work,” Leslee Lukosh told the Times about a game from Mattel called MindFlex. But it did work—all too well, since her whole family got addicted. “My boys couldn’t stop playing with it…and then none of us could stop playing it.”

30 notes

  1. brainprivacy reblogged this from realcleverscience
  2. fizzyinc reblogged this from sthinking
  3. rekrul reblogged this from realcleverscience
  4. bra1nygrl reblogged this from realcleverscience and added:
    OK…This is freaking me out a bit. The iPhone can read my mind? That’s just disaster waiting to happen. I think it may...
  5. darylelockhart reblogged this from realcleverscience
  6. realcleverscience reblogged this from sthinking and added:
    Well said. (And relevant to my recent post here.)
  7. sthinking reblogged this from azspot and added:
    What other possibilities could this kind of mass-market brain scanning entail? Portable lie detectors? Mind controlled...
  8. nerdblerg reblogged this from azspot and added:
    I do and don’t want this…
  9. iwasframed reblogged this from un
  10. un reblogged this from notational
  11. notational reblogged this from azspot
  12. wizardjks reblogged this from ffffone
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