Mindmaze Adds Emotions To Vr

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/mindmaze-mask-emotion-expression-vr,34124.html

Of all the VR and AR headsets people are working on this is one of the more interesting ones that has unlimited potential. Unlike other VR headsets out there, Mindmaze was originally invented by the healthcare industry to treat amputees with phantom limb pain and for other medical purposes. Likewise, unlike any of them it has zero latency because the damned thing reads your mind and knows what you are going to do before you can move a muscle. It uses electroencephalography to read your mind using modest contacts that touch your skull and even knows what you will do tens of milliseconds before you move which is a plenty of time for your computer to be prepared to change the picture you see ensuring, for example, that when you move your hand in the real world your avatar in VR will not lag behind you and when you pan your head around the picture always keeps up. It also means great frame rates and resolutions in VR will no longer require an expensive computer to produce with this technology.

Their last headset I saw looks more like Geordi Le Forge's visor on Star Trek and has a 160 degree field of view, which is very impressive for most headsets, but this latest revelation from them about being able to read your facial expressions and adapt their technology to any existing headset is exactly the kind of news many of us have been waiting to hear. StarVR, for example, is a huge clunky headset, but with a 210 degree field of view (the human eye has 230) and is working with IMAX to reinvent the movie theater experience and amusement parks as well to reinvent thrill rides which it is better suited for than running around shooting each other like paintball or whatever. Reading facial expressions is just one of the easier tricks the Mindmaze technology is theoretically capable of and, for example, it can also theoretically provide haptic feedback for things like touching objects in VR or feeling as if you are being pushed back in your seat by acceleration when you haven't moved an inch. It will probably be another ten years or more before they have a reasonable idea of all the easier things they can accomplish with the basic idea which is one reason they are a VR company worth paying attention to.

For those who think such things are a waste of time, Mindmaze is a reminder that this technology has medical applications that nothing else can provide and being able to fund the rapid development of the technology by selling it for entertainment purposes is a fantastic way to go.