What's better than flinging birds at pigs? The answer is simple: flinging birds at pigs with your mind. And now you can! All you need is a computer and the Emotiv EPOC headset.
Using the Emotive EPOC neuro-headset and GlovePie Rafael Mizrahi and Anat Sambol from Feng-Gui, a group of "artificial vision scientists and interactive designers," were able to figure out how to play Angry Birds with their minds. According to Hack A Day, Mizrahi and Sambol first put Angry Birds on their netbook to see if they could play it using only the EPOC headset, but they soon found out that Emotiv EPOC lacked the ability to "click" the mouse button (although they could move the mouse around by thought alone).
They fixed this problem by using GlovePie, a free programmable input emulator that can map gestures, button presses, and more. By connecting GlovePie to the Emotive headset, Rafael and Anat were able to not only move the mouse pointer, but also "click" as well.
Next, using EmoKey, a background process that links your Emotiv tech with your other applications, the gurus were able to finally play Angry Birds with their minds! In the video you see that they aren't successful right away, but near the end the music starts playing and you know they've had success!
If you would like to do this yourself, visit Emotiv and pick up a headset. Be aware that you'll have to get the SDK version, which is reportedly $500. Oof. The consumer version ($299) works only with Emotiv-authorized software. Even if you have to wait for something like this to become available for the consumer version, it's still going to break your wallet.
Personally, I can't wait to get my hands on one of these headsets. Maybe when the price drops you'll see me pitching birds like Trevor Cahill.
[Feng-Gui via Hack A Day]
Follow James Mulroy on Twitter and on StumbleUpon to get the latest in microbe , dinosaur , and death ray news .
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