Of course, the most natural user interface of all would be when the computer can read your mind with no effort on the user’s part. This is the promise of research around brain-computer interaction. Gaming is one of the first areas where we could see this type of interface come into play. In fact, a company called NeuroSky already offers some level of brainwave sensing for game play. But brain-computer interaction could do so much more than operate games. At Microsoft, for example, we’re thinking about how a computer could tailor the information it’s presenting based on a user’s state.

“The “Star Wars”-themed game, The Force Trainer, comes with a headset that reads your brainwaves and wirelessly triggers a fan to blow a ball toward the top of a clear chamber.

The technology inside the game’s “Jedi Training Remote” is pretty basic, actually. The remote is a “dry” EEG-sensing device – a headset – that reads the beta-wave emissions from your brain. (Beta waves are associated with meditative states.) The harder you concentrate, the faster the game’s fan spins, and the higher the ball goes.”

“It’s not unusual for new technologies to first enter popular consciousness as toys. In the 1st century, Heron of Alexandria invented the aeolipile: a metal ball with curved nozzles sticking out of it, perched on stilts. With water in it, and flame beneath it, the resultant steam would make it spin, whiz, whiz, whiz. Such fun. Nobody understood they were looking at a steam engine. Hence, the Industrial Revolution didn’t start for another 1700 years.”

“Mattel has inked an exclusive multi-year partnership with NeuroSky, the “consumer brain-computer interface technologies” company that birthed Mattel’s much publicized Mindflex game, to develop a new category of games and toys that operate using the power of concentration.”

“But the most interesting consequence of the coming flood of brainware isn’t technological at all. Parents, and anyone else whose schooldays are fading into memory, will be acutely aware that today’s youngsters have a facility with interactive technology that can be acutely disorienting.”

“The Force, it seems, is not so strong with this one. In the virtual world of a game called Neuroboy, I’m staring out over a lagoon at an exact digital replica of a Star Wars X-wing spaceship submerged in blue water. My task: to lift that virtual object out of its murky depths using not my mouse or keyboard, but instead–à la Luke Skywalker–my thoughts.”