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Meanwhile, a company called EmSense is making inroads into the corporate market with a headset that measures the reactions of consumers to games, ads, and other entertainment and marketing creations. EmSense hopes to provide its clients with a detailed, high-tech analysis of what flies with what types of consumers. Coca-Cola used EmSense last year to help fine-tune its Super Bowl advertising decisions. That's a business Emotiv wants to be in on as it moves beyond gaming, and no wonder. Says EmSense CEO Keith Winter: "The market research business is worth billions. It's an ocean. Gaming is a pond."

Le and her teammates have tried these rival systems and remain confident they don't come close to the Epoc's capabilities. Still, Emotiv decided in September to postpone the rollout. Why? Because it can, Le says. She insists Emotiv's technology edge is insurmountable. She also says funding isn't a problem, at least in the near term; the company raised $13.4 million in a round of financing in 2007 -- the Australian government chipped in, along with three venture capital firms. "Trying to make the Christmas time frame just wasn't necessary," she says. "We don't have to risk the whole business trying to meet an early delivery date." Le even suggests that delaying the product could prove to be a smart marketing move. "We want pent-up demand," she says. "We've already got 5,000 preordered through our website. After we deliver a good experience to those early customers, we can talk about making tons of them for next Christmas." The company hasn't announced a new launch date, but Le says the headset will be out in 2009.

Meanwhile, the team continues to think beyond games. The headset already can be used to control most ordinary functions in common software, such as word processing and spreadsheet programs, by taking the place of a mouse -- the cursor simply follows your gaze, and you can think your way into triggering the equivalent of a left or right mouse click. Not only might that be a critical tool for people who may have trouble working a mouse, but it might end up feeling a lot more natural for the rest of us. The technology could be applied to entertainment, Le says, noting that wearing a headset while listening to music or watching a video would allow your computer to track what you like and dislike down to individual choruses or scenes, and start automatically tailoring what it serves you, perhaps via a website -- a sort of brain-powered iTunes that Le hints she would like to see Emotiv own. The headset could help educators who work with children who have autism or attention deficit disorder. Social networking sites could use emotional feedback from the headset to create compatible online gatherings or even assist in matchmaking. Well, maybe. "Love is tricky to identify in brain signals," Le allows. "I'm not sure we know how to tell it apart from lust."

Some powerful partners have come on board. IBM (NYSE:IBM) is working with Emotiv to develop a corporate version of the headset that would allow, for example, virtual conferencing with avatars that represent people's expressions and feelings -- so you would know who was engaged, who was bored, who was laughing at your jokes, and, maybe, who was pretending to laugh. Ketan Paranjape, chief of technical staff at Intel, says the chip giant is interested in enlisting Emotiv's headset to navigate via thought three-dimensional representations of corporate data -- the company featured Emotiv prominently at its annual conference for developers. "We think neural devices will be the next interface," he says.

And that brings us, hypothetically, to the day when we are all wearing Emotiv hair plugs, our thoughts and feelings productively ricocheting through our homes, offices, and, through the Internet, the whole world. That's Le's vision, anyway, and she is almost dismissive of lesser goals. "We don't want to be some niche company providing a specific solution to a specific problem," she says. "We have an opportunity to create an industry that will revolutionize the whole framework of technology."

That may well happen. But first, she has to give the world a chance to move that block mentally, before someone beats her to it.

Contributing editor David H. Freedman is a Boston-based freelance writer.

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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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