It’s an extremely simple game that you can play with your eyes closed. Once you adjust the Muse to fit your head, it stays reasonably put, but it requires a few minutes of adjustment each time it’s used if you are sharing the device with someone else in your household, like I did (one Muse headset can be used across multiple smartphones).įor now, the Muse has just one smartphone app, called Calm, that teaches users to enter a meditative state. You aren’t supposed to wear it all day, and it’s sensitive enough that every time you yawn, turn your head, or make any sudden movements you have to check and make sure that all the sensors are still attached to your scalp. The Muse isn’t like most wearable tech devices available today. The $299 Muse also offers seven sensors, and while its first app focuses exclusively on bringing users into a meditative state, it has the potential to offer much more. Now, Emotiv is gearing up to release the Insight–a lightweight device that uses seven dry sensors (no gel needed) and can track head movements, gait, tremor, and gestures in addition to emotional states (like stress, focus, and relaxation) and mental commands (like push, pull, lift, drop, and disappear). Add that to the hefty price tag, and the EPOC is attractive mainly to researchers. The device feels like you’re wearing a many-tentacled creature on your head–a sensation enhanced by the fact that the sensors require conductive gel to work properly. The $399 Emotiv EPOC, released in 2009, has 14 sensors and claims to offer hospital-quality EEG readings. In general, the more electrodes (or sensors), the more insight EEG headsets can offer into brain activity. I was able to get my hands on a prototype of InteraXon’s Muse, an EEG headset that is billed as “a brain fitness tool that helps you do more with your mind, and more with your life, by helping you learn to manage stress, stay calm, and stay focused.” Another EEG headset, the single-electrode iFocusBand, is being released in October, and the company couldn’t get me a prototype in time for this article. Emotiv’s Insight headset, a more consumer-friendly followup to the electrode-heavy EPOC, won’t be available for a few months. But it turns out that I arrived a little early to the revolution. If these devices catch on, they could tell us more about ourselves than other wearables, like step-trackers and heart rate monitors, ever could. The Mindwave has been available for half a decade, but by the beginning of next year, there will be a handful of more advanced (and more expensive) EEG headsets on the market that promise to do everything from keeping wearers more calm to letting them control light switches with a mere thought. It’s a $99 device that looks like a gaming headset and uses a single EEG electrode to measure brainwaves. The man I watched, it turns out, was using a Puzzlebox Orbit brain-controlled helicopter with a NeuroSky MindWave Mobile EEG headset.