Reality Bites

The notion rang every bell in Le's head. Snyder was describing a technology breakthrough, an entrepreneurial adventure, and a way to form an entirely new, world-changing type of connection. "We stayed up until 4 in the morning talking about it," Le recalls. "By the time we got together again a few months later, we realized none of us had been able to get the idea out of our heads."

In fact, Snyder had been approached by larger companies about developing his idea. But he liked the idea of starting a company with Le and Do. "There are magical qualities to both of them," he says. "I just had a strong intuition this could work with them in charge." Le brought in another friend: Neil Weste, a prominent Australian chip designer who had sold his last company to Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) in 2000 for several billion dollars. Among these four very successful partners, start-up capital would not be a problem for the new company, which they dubbed Emotiv. There was no shortage of strategic vision, either. "We wanted to bring to computers and the Internet all the facial expressions and emotions that are so important in our interactions with each other," Le says.

Emotiv's headquarters looks like that of any Web 2.0 start-up, which is to say it is a cluttered warren with mostly twentysomethings hunched over multiple monitors in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. But you have to meet only a few of these laptop lizards to realize that something unusual is going on here. One is an expert on facial expressions. Another has designed high-powered communications software. Yet another has produced best-selling video games. Smoke from a soldering iron wafts from a side room teeming with custom circuit boards. The payroll includes mathematicians as well as an evolutionary biologist.

And then there's the charismatic Le, now 31, who is a bit harder to characterize. She is comfortable shooting the breeze about the fine points of intellectual-property protection, the structure of the human cortex, and the future of the music industry, punctuating all of it frequently with an infectious laugh. But there are also flashes of a less easygoing, sharper-edged Le -- flaring, for example, at the suggestion that Emotiv can be compared with any of the countless start-ups that have set up shop nearby. "They may take on some technology risk in their development, but they know what they want to do is doable," she says. "Here, we're pushing the boundaries of what's possible."

Measuring brain waves, of course, isn't such a big deal. Electroencephalography, or EEG, machines that track the brain's electrical activity at the scalp have been around for the better part of a century. But the best EEG machines cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and for all that, they generally haven't been used for much more than measuring relaxation levels or detecting signs of life.

When they launched Emotiv, the partners figured there was no point in hiring established EEG experts, since the state of the art in EEG machines wasn't even close to what they needed. "We decided that we'd look at the whole landscape of science," says Do, "because there had to be something out there traditional researchers were missing." Ultimately, Emotiv decided to treat emotional signal processing as a sort of math problem that could be solved with clever software. Emotiv opened an office in Sydney and staffed it with mathematicians, digital signal processing experts, and artificial intelligence whizzes. To help keep R&D costs manageable, Emotiv leaned heavily on graduate students willing to work for free in exchange for having some exciting, cutting-edge research on their resumé.

The result was a software program that broke brain waves down into 90,000 components. It was so complex that running a single 10-second brain-wave reading through the program took six computers two days. And sometimes the two-day crunching session would be for naught: The brain-wave readings were so faint that just the electrical activity generated in an eye blink was enough to swamp them. To work well, the software had to learn to filter out the noise. "It was like listening to all the phone conversations in New York at once and trying to pull a few of them out," says Snyder. But the researchers made steady progress, and as they did, Le was quick to file patents; she eventually claimed some 25 that covered a range of processes.

In late 2004, after a day of particularly good progress, the group sensed it was close to being able to read a person's level of excitement in real time. No one went home that evening. Le, Do, and the research team pulled an all nighter; they took turns wearing a standard electrode cap -- sort of like a bathing cap coated inside with gel to improve electrical conductivity -- while watching movies, listening to jokes, arguing, and more, all while a graph on the screen tracked excitement. "By morning, we knew we had it," says Le. "We knew we were going to succeed." Without any champagne on hand and with the bars closed, the team members went to a coffee shop to celebrate, their hair glistening with conductive gel.

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