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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.

On the other hand, more than 300 people gave the device a shot at the company's booth, and by almost all accounts, it was a big hit and worked well for virtually everyone who tried it. The company was encouraged enough to set a product launch time frame of the 2008 holiday season. The plan was to sell the headsets through game and electronics retailers, as well as online. Meanwhile, competitors were massing. CyberLearning Technology in San Marcos and OCZ Technology in Sunnyvale, for example, have both developed neural headsets. Hitachi in Japan has poured money into potential mind-reading products, and dozens of universities have made efforts to develop better, cheaper thought processors, any of which could lead to spinoffs. There's even an ambitious project funded by the U.S. military, which hopes to have patrolling soldiers communicating by thought within two decades.

But most notably, there's NeuroSky in San Jose, which has developed a single-electrode game-control headband. NeuroSky's device can detect only two mental states -- attention and meditation. But at a projected $50 or so, it is about one-sixth the price of Emotiv's. And for games, at least, keeping it simple could turn out to be an advantage. "People can use ours right away without training," says Greg Hyver, NeuroSky's vice president of marketing. "You can add on all the features you want to a headset, but if people can't use it right out of the box, they won't use it at all." At a conference in October, Square Enix demonstrated a zombie game that uses the NeuroSky device, and Sega is considering releasing a toy sword or a game based on the technology.

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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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