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By now, I can move that block with ease. I'm ready for a new challenge: making something happen onscreen that has no real-life analog. In this case, I'm to make that same damn block vanish into thin air. What am I supposed to think and feel? Disappear isn't part of my mental repertoire. It's suggested that I stare at the background scene and visualize it without the block. I conjure the image in my mind and focus on making it vivid. The block flickers. I sear the blockless image into my brain, and just like that, the block is gone. Who knew I had the ability to concentrate in such deadly ways? Now for some easier fun. An animated face comes up on the screen, and I'm told to make faces. As I grin, the face grins; it matches my frown, blink, wink, and eyebrow arching. I'm a cartoon! I feel as if the headset is helping me realize fantasies I didn't even know I harbored.

Le and her colleagues were just as tickled when they found they could perform similar feats. But they soon realized they now had a serious decision to make, one they had been putting off while the very feasibility of the project was in play: What do we do with this? Hit the market with an expensive device that would sell in low volume? License the technology to one or more big companies? Or somehow figure out how to bring the costs down enough to sell to a mass audience? The co-founders had been dreamily discussing the possibilities all along, but now they met to formally choose their future. "Nam and I were very excited about the opportunities around licensing, but then Allan said to us, 'We don't want to make money doing this,' " recalls Le. "Nam and I rolled our eyes, thinking that this was typical scientist talk. Then Allan added, 'We want to make a lot of money.' " They all laughed, but the point was clear: They had all seen success in past exploits. Why bother to do this if they weren't going to go for the jackpot? They decided to shoot for the mass market.

The strategy is counterintuitive, to say the least. "The best beachhead strategy for a new technology is one that demonstrates that the technology works, is highly valued by the customer, and gives you a high margin," says Jerome Engel, executive director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. The transistor, for example, was first brought to market in 1952, when it was used in hearing aids. Customers were grateful rather than finicky, marketing was fairly simple, and the revenue funded expansion into bigger markets. Emotiv, in fact, is working with a wheelchair company to develop a thought-controllable device for those who can't move their body. But that's a sideline. The company's biggest bet remains squarely on consumers -- which Engel finds risky. "If you go for a consumer market first," he says, "you're racing against limited resources, you need to get a lot of partners, and you need to have a very sexy product that delivers exactly what unforgiving customers are looking for. These guys made a choice that carries a huge risk."

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.

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David H. Freedman

A Boston-based contributing editor, Freedman is the co-author of A Perfect Mess, which examines the useful role of disorder in daily life, business, and science. His other books include Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines; At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (co-authored with Charles C. Mann); and Brainmakers: How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain.

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