Still Chasing Gibson
It could be argued that most of the virtuali realityi research carried out in the last twenty years has been aimed at making William Gibson's vision in Neuromancer a reality. Another attempt, to make the technology a mainstream consumer product, has been announced (BBC story). The Emotiv EPOC (Flash 9 required) is (or will be?) a headset that can, it is claimed, read brain activity and convert the information in to computer inputs. The company claim that it can recognise thirty different emotions, expressions and actions including 'excitement, meditation, tension and frustration; facial expressions such as smile, laugh, wink, shock (eyebrows raised), anger (eyebrows furrowed); and cognitive actions such as push, pull, lift, drop and rotate (on six different axis).'
The Gibson influence can perhaps be seen most clearly in the Emortal view on the Emotiv site which appears to be (the site is very information light) a 3D web interface to work with the headset. It's also not clear whether the headset actually exists at the moment since the most you can do is reserve one. Should this technology actually work in a useful fashion (does anyone else remember the 'revolution' that was to be tactile input devices a few years back?) it would be interesting to see it combined with experiments in head tracking/3D imaging.
The application of such technology for online gaming and virtual worlds is perhaps fairly obvious. I wonder if anyone has done any research in to whether a fully immersive interface is actually a desirable feature for other Internet users.
