The decision to shoot for a mass market immediately led to another: The one market that seemed ripe for a large-scale invasion of innovative interface technology was the video-game industry. "Better and better graphics had reached a point of diminishing returns, while there had been almost no innovation in controllers," Le says. "And gamers tend to be early adopters, making them a good incubator for a new technology." Emotiv opened a new headquarters in San Francisco, placing it close to the heart of the gaming industry, while keeping an R&D team in Sydney.
With a market in mind, Emotiv could now pin down the details of its device. Gamers weren't going to wear a gooey bathing cap, so the team came up with a rigid, relatively unobtrusive, even cool-looking headset able to get an accurate brain-wave reading with 16 gel-free sensors instead of the 128 sticky ones in a standard EEG cap. The headset was augmented with a tiny gyroscope to track head motions and a wireless transmitter to free the wearer of wires. More important, the software's brain-wave-interpreting capabilities were improving by leaps and bounds. The software would eventually be able to differentiate among 30 of what the company characterizes as mental states, roughly divided into three categories -- emotions, facial expressions, and actions. All three types of mental states would be critical: Actions would allow controlling what a character does, facial expressions would convey feelings and intentions to fellow online players, and emotions would allow a game to respond to how a player was feeling. A plot could change when you were bored, a virtual character could appear more often if you found him engaging or threatening, music or lighting could shift to complement your mood.
The technology worked, but it didn't work perfectly for everyone. Some users had more trouble than others sending out consistent, identifiable signals, even after running through a training session. And that, says Le, was a shadow hanging over the future of Emotiv. "If we let something seen as half baked get onto the market, it would be a disaster," she says. "We have an opportunity to revolutionize the way people interact with technology. But we won't get a chance to do that unless we provide the right experience in the beginning."
To make the device easier and more fun to use, Emotiv's team worked furiously with a small video-game-development company called Demiurge Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to embed the technology in a gamelike context. Instead of a boring training session, an Asian sensei walks you through an exotic introduction to your new powers. He gets you to grimace at annoying flying creatures to make them flee, to lift heavy objects, and more. This acclimation process gives the software a chance to record your brain waves and trains you to use them consistently before it throws a series of increasingly difficult challenges at you, such as reconstructing simply via thought a fallen bridge needed for a mystical journey while a fiery sky changes hue in response to your emotional state. Another mini game teaches you to hurl thunderbolts.
The market seemed to break in Emotiv's favor with the success of the Nintendo Wii, which lets users wield game controllers like rackets or steering wheels; the Wii's popularity suggested a real thirst for new sorts of interfaces.
And so, buoyed by early results with test subjects, Emotiv decided to take a chance and unveil a prototype in February 2008, at the closely watched Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. There, new video games and accessories can pick up buzz or sink under the gaming community's disdain.
On the show's opening night, with thousands of attendees and reporters in the audience and video cameras rolling, an Emotiv team member named Zachary Drake attempted to move a cube and more, which by this point was something anyone at Emotiv could do in his or her sleep. But for the first time since the team's big breakthrough, the device, which the team had named the Epoc, simply stopped working. Clearly rattled, Drake gamely tried again and again to work his will on the screen, his face a knot of concentration, his arms reaching out plaintively. For a moment, the crowd was silent. "I think people cringed for us," says Le. Then, the murmuring and snickering began. "Welcome to demo hell, folks," Drake said.
The Emotiv team later learned that a powerful wireless network at the facility had wiped out the connection between the headset and the PC. That the demo might fail had never entered Le's mind, and she just stood there, stunned: "We had done so many dry runs and had never had a problem. I was so shocked. I was speechless." The debacle led to widespread ridicule of the company -- "The Force Is Not Strong With Emotiv's Epoc," "Watch Emotiv's Performance Anxiety," and "The Trade Show and Demo Hall of Shame" were among the headlines on gaming sites.
