While the post title may inspire commentary about the relative brain power of many drivers on the road these days, the video below actually does show a car — a Volkswagen Passat — being steered by only the mind of its driver. No hands, no special voice commands… just brain power.
BrainDriver is a is the mad scheme of Raul Rojas and his colleagues at the Free University of Berlin. It is not intended to be a technology used in general vehicle production, but is more of a proof of concept experiment to show that we can marry the human mind to machines (or to computers that are attached to machines) and control those machines with our thoughts. Control is accomplished by training a computer to read intent via the brain’s output of electromagnetic signals, picked up by an electroencephalography (EEG) headset that was originally developed by Emotiv for gaming (it’s $299 – if’ you’ve tried one, let us know about it).
Intended for future production or not, and even in its rudimentary form, BrainDriver brings all sorts of fun sci-fi applications to mind — especially of the thought-controlled spaceship variety. Forget cars. Bring on the personal starfighters!
Is this cool or what?
Thinking Your Way Through Traffic in a Brain-Control Car [Wired]
