By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 21, 2008

The next video game controller you use might be between your ears. A start-up company called Emotiv Systems has developed a helmet-like headset that, it says, lets users control game characters with their thoughts.

The device looks like something used for heavy-duty orthodontics, and it comes with receptors that read activity among the brain's neurons. The player then teaches the device's software to associate thought patterns with commands. According to the game news blog Kotaku, which got an early look, players could push and pull an object by willing it so or scare spirits away with a grimace.

Due out this year, Emotiv's device offers one of the more far-out views of what the future of the gaming industry could look like. It was also one of several products making a debut this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, an annual video game confab that started in a game designer's living room 20 years ago and has grown into a 16,000-person industry event.

This year's show comes at a heady time for the industry, which is focusing more on making gaming more intuitive -- if not mind-reading. One of the drivers of that trend has been the success of Nintendo's Wii, which a year and a half after its launch is still selling so quickly that it's hard to keep it stocked in stores. The Wii has helped further transform gaming into a mainstream hobby that is more accessible to those not fluent in the latest technology.

The Sony PlayStation 3 has had slower sales but got a potential boost this week after a series of announcements endorsing the high-definition video technology built into its system. The consumer-electronics industry's backing of Blu-ray technology over its rival HD DVD format could mean that more non-gamers buy the PS3 as an upgrade to their DVD systems, analysts said. All of this buoys an industry whose U.S. sales totaled $18 billion last year, up 43 percent from the year before, according to the research firm NPD Group.

Online distribution of games is one major theme at the conference this year. Microsoft, for example, said it is launching a service to allow programmers to design and distribute their own games over the Web instead of on discs. Nintendo announced similar plans to allow game designers to publish their own Wii-compatible titles online. WiiWare, as the service is known, is to launch May 12 and is expected to increase the number of games available on the system.

Building on the motion-sensing technology of the controller for its Wii, Nintendo also announced a May 19 U.S. launch date for Wii Fit, a balance board that senses shifting weight. The board will allow users to control their game characters doing yoga, for example, or skiing down a mountain. The company still has not yet announced a U.S. price for the device, which has sold 1.4 million units in Japan since December.

Although much of the video game industry's enthusiasm is focused on building its market by appealing to "casual" gamers with products like Wii Fit, the show still included a few announcements for hard-core gamers.

To the gamer who favors a good, old fashioned shoot-'em-up, the game developer Epic said a sequel to the Xbox 360 game Gears of War -- a blockbuster hit that gave players an opportunity to fight aliens with a chainsaw-equipped assault rifle -- is scheduled for release in November.