The impressive thing about Emotiv’s interactive EEG gaming cap is that it apparently works, recognizing facial expression and allowing movement of items in a 3d environment. The company has an impressive engineering and managerial team.

Magnetoencephalography devices cn be used in addition to MRI to measure electrical brain activity via devices that clearly look like one is wearing a giant ice cream cone. The magnetic fields in the brain are around a million billionth of a Tesla, so these devices need to sit in room that are shielded from the earths magnetic fields.

The image of someone wearing electrical sensors studded all over the head and face, to measure electrical brain activity is a cinematic staple for quackery yet it is actually grounded in genuinely useful science. shown here is a researcher wearing a particularly impressive array of EEG cap sensors, at the Vision and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, McMaster University in Ontario.

No idea exactly what type of device this is, we assume it is some kind of early MEG.

This appears to be the latest iteration of Emotiv’s BCI device (the previous version is also in this list). We are including both, since Emotiv seem to be the people to watch to see if these devices can become a commercially viable for consumer electronics.

Rahmat Shoureshi, dean of Engineering and Computer Science at Denver University, received a $300K National Science Foundation grant to fund development of brain-imaging technologies to allow allow amputees to control electronic prosthetics by thought.

Going one step beyond the Wii’s haptic interface, several companies are producing simple brain control interfaces fro gaming. OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator promises to be on the market this year, for around $300.

This DARPA project is the kind of ‘out there’ research you get with government military funding. The idea is to create a feedback look to measure how much and when to deliver information via computer, based upon a person’s ability or need to process it.

In 2007, IMEC in Belgium, developed a 2-channel wireless EEG system powered by a thermo-electric generator. It uses the body heat dissipated naturally from the forehead.

Emsense is using EEG systems not to control objects but to measure people’s emotional responses to them, for market research.

At the moment there are two options for scanning infants brains - ultrasound which is portable but less useful, and MRI which requires the patient to be really still, and therefore sedated if its an infant. This device promises the best of both worlds, being portable and high resolution, using Optical Tomography, i.e. shining lasers inside the head.

The latest brain scanner improvements by Siemens promise an order of magnitude increase in the resolution of MRI images by increasing the density of coils in a headset.