The headband has a trio of sensors across the front, and those sensors read electrical impulses in various frequency ranges, which equate to a number of different facial movements and—so it would seem, at least—patterns of thought.
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Schuette mapped the most basic controls to the facial muscle inputs, but the most impressive input had to be his “jump” key, which he mapped to one of the brain wave readings and activated via what he called his “Tourette’s impulse.” Basically, he’d think of an expletive, and his character would jump.
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One of the things that surprised me about using the headband is how, well, cerebral it is to use. I expected to be contorting my facial muscles wildly in order to use it, but in reality, it’s best to relax and gently control things. On top of that, something about the experience of using it is difficult to articulate but intuitive to apprehend. ^
We’re halfway there. The new interface uses the complex hardware our machines have for graphics and adapts it to interpret the sine waves our brains produce. It then translates these into motions which, while primitive now, could conceivably be more significant in the future. It can’t read thoughts, in other words, but it can read activity in certain areas of the brain. In William Gibson’s futuristic cyberpunk epic Neuromancer, hackers navigate with a headset for visualization but steer with a keyboard. It will be interesting to see if this headset becomes a two-way interface.