NeuroSky's Myndplay Gives You Whole New Remote--Your Brain

Tweet

We’ve seen plenty of strange remotes around here, from the separate IR unit, to dongles attached to cell phones and tablets, to even the Jedi mind trick of waving your hand to control rewind and fast forward. But this may be the strangest of them all, as the folks out at NeuroSky take their Mindwave remote and slave it to a series of game / movie hybrids, produced by a new subsidiary called Myndplay.

And this isn’t just some rewind / fast forward type of remote, either–this remote actually allows you to affects events on screen, based on your level of focus on the events on screen, or your level of relaxation. For instance, NeuroSky was showing the whole thing with a little game / movie called Paranormal Mynd, and in that, you played–yes, actually played–an exorcist out to stop a woman from choking to death. The harder you focused on the woman being attacked by evil spirits, the less “effect” the spirits had. Lose your focus for too long and she’d choke to death, on screen.

Other shows included multiple endings–one gangster game / movie, for example, allowed your level of focus to determine whether a gunshot missed you, hit you, or hit the guy standing next to you.

Now here’s where things get interesting: not only is Myndplay looking to put out a lot of these kinds of game / movie hybrids under a variety of different concepts, but they’re also planning to open up the floor to regular folks who want to develop their own Myndplay-style projects with a tool called Myndplay Pro.

The individual projects are set to sell between $0.49 to $1.99, depending on the episode in question (and likely relating to things like length and content), but there’s no word on how much MyndPlay Pro will sell for, if anything. The Mindwave remote, meanwhile, is set to sell at $99.

It’s an interesting new development in gaming, that’s for sure, and I’d frankly like to see the Mindwave get some more expansion where you could use it to think fast forward or rewind. It’d definitely be nice to watch a movie, think “Wow, this is dull,” or conversely “Whoa! What was that?” and have the movie respond accordingly. Still though, I’ll take a game where my focus determines the outcome.