Reykjavík Grapevine - 11.03.2011, Blaðsíða 9

8
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 3 — 2011
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Telekinesis For Dummies
Control yr. iPhone with YOUR BRAIN!!!
Packed into a single floor of the Ís-
landsbanki (née Glitnir) building on
Lækjargata are several fledgling soft-
ware companies, among them the
six-person operation known simply as
MindGames.
Funded by RannÍs and the Icelandic
Ministry of Industry, MindGames is es-
sentially a software developer of sorts.
They specialise in something quite
more awesome: mind-control gam-
ing, and are one of a select few in the
entire world who do so. They basically
design computer games where at least
one aspect of the game is controlled
via neural interface with special EEG,
or Electro-Encephalographic, headsets
fitted with one or more quarter-inch
wide sensor pads. An Electro-Enceph-
alogram is, simply put, a reading of the
electrical activity generated by neurons
firing in your brain. Think in a certain
way, and the sensor detects it, and uses
it to interface with the game. In other
words, you can make video games do
shit with the power of your brain. While
you’re waiting for the awesome in that
sentence to fully sink in, keep reading.
THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST
Deepa Iyengar and her husband
Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson developed
the idea for the company in January
2009. “I had the idea, and dragged him
in… we had two other friends, the four
of us developed a business plan and
entered it in the Innovit Golden Egg en-
trepreneurial competition, and we got
‘top ten’ in that,” Deepa explains. The
office is a bare-bones affair, one big
room with dividers and Ikea furniture.
The other staffers stare intently at their
computer screens as Deepa and I talk
in the conference room. “Then I spent
basically from April to June recruiting
the people who ended up founding
MindGames.”
It’s an impressive roster. Hannes
has an MA and a PhD from MIT’s media
laboratory, and is an associate profes-
sor of computer science at the artificial
intelligence lab of Reykjavík University
(yes, they totally have one of those),
computer programmer Örn Haraldsson
is also a certified yoga and meditation
instructor (I’m not making these people
up), Ragnar Már Nikulásson and Katla
Rós Völudóttir are both recent gradu-
ates from the Iceland Academy of the
Arts, Hjalti Kolbeinsson is a software
engineer also from Reykjavík Univer-
sity, while Deepa herself has an MA in
brain and cognitive science from MIT.
HEADSETS: THEy WON’T GET yOU
LAID
Deepa shows me the gaming headsets,
which have names like the NeuroSky
MindSet and the Emotiv EPOC, and are
made by a variety of fairly secretive and
paranoid companies. “They don’t want
to tell us exactly how they work, and
we’re not allowed to reverse-engineer
them,” Deepa explains. “They don’t re-
ally work together, but I think it’ll be the
company that branches out, that tries
to work with the others that’ll end up
dominating the market.” I try them on
and catch my reflection in the confer-
ence room window. I look like an idiot.
“These were obviously intended for
use in the privacy of your own home,”
Deepa says.
While the larger, more padded (and
more difficult-to-put-on) headsets ac-
tually record neurons firing in multiple
parts of the brain, the smaller ones have
only one sensor, recording one spe-
cific form of brain activity. In the case
of MindGames’ two most successful
games, ‘Gods And Mortals’ and ‘Tug Of
Mind’, these ‘one-spot’ headsets record
the activity associated with relaxation.
KILL yOUR GODS
Tug Of Mind is actually an iPhone app,
a simple game where you stare at a re-
alistically rendered face that makes dif-
ferent expressions at you depending on
your own level of relaxation. The game
also lets you create and customise the
face you play against, meaning you can
square off against your boss, your dad
or that one sketchy neighbour you keep
having darkly erotic nightmares about.
Or not.
The more you relax, the faster
your ‘progress’ bar fills, until you fill it
completely and win. Although simple,
it forces you into an odd mindset – if
you think about winning, you start los-
ing. Think of it as good practice in case
you ever go against Gozer the Gozerian;
whatever you do, don’t think of the Sta-
Puft Marshmallow Man.
‘Gods And Mortals’, on the other
hand, is slightly more complex. Deepa
is the first to admit that the technol-
ogy is still quite expensive, unwieldy,
impractical and owned only by a select
few, but to combat this, as well as en-
courage more widespread recognition
and use of the EEG headsets, ‘Gods
And Mortals’ was designed as a plat-
form game with a cunning twist: it pits
players without headsets against those
who have them, turning the latter into
immensely powerful gods.
While the mortals’ mission is to build
towers to reach heaven and kill the
gods, the gods have powers to destroy
the towers. The powers, in a concept
intimately familiar to most video gam-
ers, need mana to work, but whereas
in most games mana regenerates au-
tomatically over time, the god-players
in ‘Gods And Mortals’ have to actually
relax in order for it to regenerate.
THINGS TAKE A TURN FOR THE
AWESOME
Also of note is the headset calibrator
which is, on the surface, purely func-
tional, but when I tried it I learned it ac-
tually makes for a fun little game in and
of itself. Basically, you stare at a picture
of a box. The calibration begins when
you touch a button and the headset ‘re-
cords’ 8 seconds of you ‘thinking’ the
box to float up vertically in the air. The
process is then repeated until you’ve
recorded several axes of movement for
the box, as well as for the box fading
away and disappearing, which is obvi-
ously more difficult conceptually than
simple movement.
Once the headset had recorded the
brain activity corresponding with the
movement of the box, I simply had to
stare at the box and think it to move in a
certain direction, and holy shit it actu-
ally worked.
While pushing the box back and
forth was simple enough, levitation, or
moving the box along the up-down axis
proved harder. Imagining Master Yoda
on my shoulders, I simply closed my
eyes and pictured the box floating, and
sure enough, it did. Go back and read
that sentence again and try to convince
me it’s not awesome. I’m in the phone-
book.
What this all boils down to is that
someone, somewhere, has to be work-
ing on a Star Wars video game where
you can actually use The Force. There
just has to be. And if there isn’t, there
damn well should be.
Industry | Captains of...
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