One great thing about doing what we do is that we get to try out brainwave headsets before most other people. We recently received a pre-release copy of the upcoming NIA Plus or “neural impulse actuator plus” by BCInet (formerly OCZ).

The NIA Plus is the most comfortable headset we’ve tried yet. It has a certain post-apocalyptic style…like a vision of 2010 from a movie made in the ´80’s or early ´90’s. Easy to put on, it also stays firmly where you put it, so that the electrical connection between the headset and your head is stable.

Unlike the NeuroSky MindSet or Emotiv EPOC, the NIA Plus does not incorporate the signal amplifier into the headset. This sounds much less stylish (think of wearing your headset with a mobile phone), but on the other hand, neither NeuroSky nor Emotiv has mobile phone-compatible headsets on the market. If you are sitting in front of your computer anyway, it doesn’t matter whether you have an external amplifier as well, as long as it is small. This, I think, is also true even if you’re talking about sitting in a cafe with your laptop.

Also, as the headset is connected by a good old wire to the amplifier, which in turn connects by wire to the computer, the player is not plagued by signal interruption, which often happens with wireless brainwave headsets. Again, although it sounds less portable, weigh the inconvenience of a small cable against the inconvenience of unnecessary signal interruption.

The headset calibrates quickly, within half a minute, with excellent feedback in software so that you don’t feel uncertain about what is going on while you wait. However, the message it gives you should you not be correctly connected needs to be more clear. On the bright side, it is almost impossible to not be correctly connected, since the headset is easy to put on, stays where you put it, and its connection to the computer depends on your ability to plug things in.

The software is in the 1980s post-apocalyptic style of the headset, and as such will please mainstream hardcore gamers/sci-fi fans.

The software guides the first-time user through several demos which help you to master the NIA’s controls. The first demo lets you learn to control the movements of a stick figure with facial muscle tension, left or right glance, and some mental alpha and beta functions. It takes time to learn to regulate the level of muscle tension and glance. However, the functions measuring your mental alpha and beta brainwave activity are easily interfered with by your muscle activity; so, if you raise your eyebrows, the alpha and beta measurements also rise. Therefore, from an end-user’s point of view, the NIA Plus is not really a brainwave headset, but a headset for controlling games with your facial muscles.

The Wii is popular because it allows gamers to control games with more natural movements. Brainwave headsets will be popular because they allow gamers to move things in games with their minds – to be jedis. But does a facial muscle control headset have this kind of appeal? I, at least, don’t think so.

In order to catch on, a new game or computer interface must allow people to do something they have never been able to do before, or at the least, to do it better. We believe that brainwave headsets have this characteristic; for example, our Tug of Mind could never have been a game with any other type of interface than mental. (Push a button many times to make a face turn from angry to calm?)

But what special space would muscle control headsets occupy? The NIA Plus software allows you to easily map facial muscle and glance controls to the controls of your favorite videogames. In fact, some maps to popular videogames come with the software. These mappings allow you to replace keyboard and mouse presses with facial ticks. But, for people who are not paralyzed from the neck down, it is difficult to see why you would want to control these games with your face when you can control them better with your hands.

From a developer’s standpoint, BCInet is approaching the alpha and beta brainwave functions honestly, allowing developers to deal in software with the fact that muscle and eye muscle movements highly contaminate EEG signals. However, exposing these basic alpha and beta functions to the user is just disillusioning, because users will quickly see that they are unusable as game or biofeedback controls. It would make sense to give developers access to the alpha and beta controls, but give end-users access to only the muscle tension and glance controls through the software that comes with the NIA Plus.

Ground control to Major Tom….one last detail which must be improved is that if you carelessly take off the headset so that the electrodes go through your hair, you will end up ripping out a lot of your front hair.

We were looking at a beta version of the hardware and software, and it will be exciting to see how the NIA Plus develops as the time for release gets nearer. As it is at present, the NIA Plus is for gamers who want to see how it is to control their favorite PC games using their faces. The NIA Plus is not as yet Mac-compatible. A big thank you to the BCInet team for generously allowing us to try out the NIA Plus!