Slashdot Mirror
Let the Mindgames Begin
chienr writes "Like Pong, but instead of paddles, you use your brainwaves to control the ball over to the opponent's goal, that's Mindball! This apparatus was previously an experiment under the name Brainball, and is now commercially available - here's another link with video."
At last, a computer game for women.
doping scandals.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It seems to me, that the best way to win would be to just close your eyes and ignore the ball. Better yet, take a nap.
Atari was going to put out a similar device for their 2600 way back when.
It's funny how in all of these futuristic shows we show people playing games and controlling cars with our minds. Now it's becoming a reality on a much quicker timescale than we imagined.
It's just like how the book 2001 predicted we'd have space travel, and land on the moon, then we did, way before 2001. It's nice when technology moves faster than fiction.
I are winner
So, in order to play you have to almost *not care* if you win or lose...
:)
This may have uses in anger management courses, but I can't see it popping up in bars and arcades any time soon.
They had something like this on TNG's episode "The Game", where Wesley and Ensign Robin Lefler are the only ones on board that have not been taken over by a game you control with your mind. I am sure if Wil Wheaton is reading this he will have an Ashley Judd comment ;-)
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
I thought the real mindgames were all the 503's Slashdot has been throwing as part of a guerilla marketing campaign for the Manchurian Candidate or something.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Isn't EGG electrogastrography...having to do with measuring stomach/digestive tract activity?
Don't they mean the EEG, the electroencephalogram?
A Concerned Reader by the name of Paolo (marcoe.net)
Wake me up when they are playing with a bottle of Janx Spirit.
"Oh don't give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ No, don't you give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die/ Won't you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit").
... I don't have the minimum system requirements...
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
This tech is tailor made for the porn industry. Guaranteed profit, no ??? necessary.
Moo.
"Be the ball, be the ball....."
$19k for a simplistic, albeit technically interesting, game seems rather steep. Now if it made Tyra Banks come rolling to me...
That table looks like something from a pizza parlor circa 1985.
. html
Lot of other stuff on this:
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,58193,00
and this one which is funny..
Cheers
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Seems like the ideal stoner party game.
Duuuude, I am soooo much more relaxed than you.
Talkin smack bitch? Watch my total relaxation crush your total relaxation.
Whoooooaaaaaa
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
... it has really odd side effects. Its almost like psychokenesis.
Thinking about it gets me angry, and everytime I get angry, slashdot gets 503 errors... Sorry about those, folks.
Seriously, though... isn't there such a thing as 'rolling back production code,' and 'unit tests,' and 'testing out code on a test server before pushing to production'?
Those of us that work in coding shops use these profusely... would be more professional to see something like this in action at slashdot.
If you agree, please mod up.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This is also used to aid people who are completely paralysed to communicate through a PC.
It uses a P6 response which is exercised through pre-emptive expectant brain activity. If you hook up a ECG, and filter the waveforms, at certain points a frequency jumps, at the point where you expect a red traffic light to go green.
Signal processing of ECG signals allows you to isolate certain conditions of thought, and therefore, thought allows you to control whatever is triggered by the filters.
Neat! I can save myself RSI in 5 years, but fry my brain trying to think-type and solve programming problems.
Perhaps they will use this to install seti in everyones brain!!
Tod.
PS: Seti is evil.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
you kids with your cheap jedi references. pah.
Imagine a contest to see who can muster the largest amount of brainwaves?
Of course; this might end up looking like a constipation contest if it got out of hand! heh
....move along....nothing to see here....
You would probably keep losing.
I'm guessing that the final loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually obscenely biological.
This goes for any "game"... including music.
When you care, you hesistate, and when you hesistate, you leave the groove.
It's important to plow forward with a sense of abandonment. Any excess tension, mental or physical, will shut you down - no matter if you are in a concert hall, the golf course, or a tennis court!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Wow, this is fantastic stuff. Why are people complaining this is 'too simple'? What do you want, Honda ads featuring steering wheel-less cars?
This is an absolute (apologies to Scott Bakula) Quantum Leap over anything I've ever seen before. I'm no scientist so I haven't seen the prior research, but this is amazing stuff. I think if the news media gets a hold of this one the interest would skyrocket.
Whether this is proof of concept or not, the reality is that nothing has ever been created that is anywhere like this in the commerical market. Even for the super-rich, this is the toy to have. I could've swore this was $199.00 (by quickly misreading the price) and was pulling at my wallet when I realized my mistake.
Where is the wonder? Where is the spectacle? Are we really so jaded to everything that when something unabashadly ingenius arrives, even in the most simplistic of forms, we can't simply enjoy it?
I believe this is the beginning of an era, one that will only hasten its way here if this gets the attention it deserves. What geek wouldn't love to face-off with an archrival or friend?
Battle of wits? Meeting of the minds? This is fantastic.
...I wear my tin-foil hat?
WTF is an Ashley Judd comment?
A Linux user kissed Ashley Judd. Yes, it's true (Wil Wheaton uses Mandrake). BEAT THAT YOU SMUG BSD SNOBS!
Nah! Tinkering with production code is done by many major coding shops...
Chicago Tribune: Link
Additional: Hasn't missed a paper since the Chicago Fire...All I received Monday was the Business section. Didn't bring the company down...but hurt big!
Sprint: Link
Additional: Sprint had to outsource it because if you own a sprint phone and ever called customer service, half the time they couldn't help you because the computers were down! Almost brought the company down.
A&TT Wireless: Link
Additional: DID bring the company down.
Microsoft: Link
Additional: Brought MANY companies down...
I'm sure I can name more production bungles...Slashdot 503 for an hour isn't a company crasher though.
-Electrawn
There is an art installation in Toronto called Deconism that asks people to sit around tables, each wearing similar "brainwave detection" devices. Your brain activity contributes to some computer generated music, thus you're doing musical improv with your MIND!!
In actuality though, the difference between YOU CONTROL IT WITH YOUR MIND and "you take a few deep breaths, and your levels change" is quite a big dissapointment.
This sounds no different.
What I *really* want to see is something that you calibrate: i.e. Think "left," and the pattern is recognized, likewise for think "right." Then you can control an actual game of Pong or Arkanoid with your mind. That would impress me.
What's much more interesting, IMHO, is the circular printer on the home page (it's about halfway down).
"The biosensor system, registers the electrical activity in the brain - so called EGG."
Cripes, I've been doing it wrong all these years. I thought it was electroencephalogram (EEG). Now I find out that the brain runs on chicken embryos.
Makes sense though. Most people I know are either hard boiled, fried, or totally scrambled. I wonder if I can get a refund on my student loans and apply for chef's school instead.
The anti-drug TV ad was right: "THIS IS YOUR BRAIN....."
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
It always starts with pong and ends with getting bombarded by enough spam to drive a person nuts, cept this time it's getting beamed directly into your head.
This message was brought to you by the death of 30 brain cells.
ummmm. wait, that didn't come out right
Check out these guys. Full multi-axis control, even a brain controlled mouse with clicking. Hell, they even piloted a sailboat with it. I saw it years ago on some science show, and they are still around. Much more advanced than the expensive showpiece in the article.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So who is going to be the first to make a homebrew mindball system using an OpenEEG interface?
You could probably build the entire thing for less than $1000 in parts.
i played the game one time at the CeBit expo this year ... but as the place was really crowded and loud, i had no ideea if i lost or win - i did not know if you win or loose when the ball comes to your place .. now i know - miserable failure
why did u peaople post this, i was such a happy winner for several months
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Is it happy? Can we taunt it?
Dyolf Knip
I've played it. Fun stuff.
.5-3.5 Hz Sleep
They had a table at the Wired NextFest in SF a few months back.
It was one of the most entertaining things for me there. (The Z-Printer was
another cool thing. (Printed 3D models.))
As they describe, a person per side, each with a headband to read brain activity
like an EEG. Press a button for game reset and the ball moves to the center
(magnetic mechanism under the table). I believe the graphs' Y-axes corresponded
to brain activity *frequency*.
(Brain wave frequencies for your reference:
Beta 14-30 Hz Alert Wakefulness
Alpha 8-13 Hz Relaxed
Theta 4-7 Hz Drowsiness, Unconsciousness
Delta
(Brain Wave Frequencies) )
The ball had each hemisphere a different color so the rolling was more obvious.
Three graphs: One for each player's brain activity and a combined graph to
illustrate the difference. The greater the difference, the faster the ball
motion.
It's weird. You have two contestants struggling against one another through
being calm. They sit and stare at the table, or even close their eyes. And
then the ball on the tabletop moves without visible interaction. It does indeed
look like some bizarre telekinetic battle. I really liked that.
People freak out a little bit more as they start to lose. Interestingly,
children who played had very, very poor control over their frequencies. Their
graphs were consistently frenetic.
I lost my first game, figured out roughly how to control my activity in the
second game (won), and the final game I spent toying with my opponent. I would
relax my mind and unfocus my thoughts and the ball would start rolling toward
the goal on his side of the table. Relax, relax... and when the ball was on
the verge of scoring I started thinking wildly and trying to feel panicked,
and maybe move my eyes around a lot. The ball would slow, stop, and reverse,
heading toward my side of the table. It must have looked like an epic battle,
but I was just fucking with the guy. My gf saw my graph go from smooth and low
to jerky then back and she figured I was messing around. After a while it
seemed like maybe it was going on too long for the audience's amusement, so I
finished him.
Maybe I'm biased because I won, but I thought it was very fun. I can see this
being a great parlor game *and* biofeedback tool for practicing meditation.
Hey, maybe battling against your own previous performances is a good idea.
Psychic athletes have been caught doping, literally with marijuana to attempt to cheat at the game "Mindball" by chemically altering themselves to feel more relaxed. Coincidentally, the accused athletes have all been unreachable for comment due to "overseas vacations".
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Those who find this mind-blowing might want to check out Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card - fantastic SF book (winner of both the awards whose names I can't remember now). At its core is a game not so unlike this (although admittedly a tad more sophisticated)...
IBM will create a computer and name it "Deep Null", then it will match it against the current Mindball world champion, the dalai lama.