What if you could visualize what your brain was doing on the screen of your iPhone? That’s the promise of XWave, a strange-looking contraption you clamp onto your head that reads your mind.You can see the results of its brainwave-reading magic on the free XWave iPhone app, displaying a graphical ball that you can raise by focusing your thoughts. Or so it seems.
Because it costs $100, we had high expectations for this XWaveheadgear, yearning to be amazed. Plugging it into the iPhone’s earphone jack, I clamped its headband onto assorted noggins to see what would happen. This slightly uncomfortable plastic thingamajig with a little earlobe clamp has a sensor that presses against its user’s forehead. Flip the switch, plug it into an iPhone’s headphone jack, and that’s when the fun starts.
The headband communicates with the free XWave iPhone app, and once it begins to receive the signal, it measures various brain waves. By changing your state of mind, you can affect the graphics on the screen.
For instance, on one screen, if you focus your mind, you can make a graphical ball move higher and higher on the screen. Another screen helps you achieve nirvana, measuring your degree of relaxation using pulsating color. The more relaxed you get, the more the color shifts toward the blue part of the spectrum.
Does it work? You can see the screens changing as you become more relaxed or focused. It feels like you’re making these things happen. In fact, one cerebral member of our group was able to bring both of the factors above 90%, far more than anyone else. It’s far from scientific proof, but that indicates there’s actually something going on here.
This is not exactly a scientific instrument, but we thought it was a lot of fun as a parlor game, and its results coincided with the personalities of some of our informal test subjects. The iPhone app is not quite perfect — for example, it won’t let you sign up for the service to save your results — but if you have an extra $100 to blow just for fun, this might be a good candidate.
No comments:
Post a Comment