You’ve always wanted to have cat ears that react to your brain waves, right? No? Well, here they are anyway, nine minutes of members of the public with big fuzzy wiggling cat ears:
Some of the people look tremendously unenthusiastic, don’t they?
Here’s another promotional video for Necomimi that tries to sell the “neuro communication” device, showing how the ears move when you concentrate or relax.
What it doesn’t show is why you’d want this. For those of us who blush easily, it’s all we can do NOT to show our emotions when we don’t want to. I suppose that something that reacted to emotion would be good for people who, through mental disability or other inability to communicate, can’t show their emotions. For the rest of us, mind-controlled devices hold out a lot of promise, but it would probably be best if they didn’t take the form of fuzzy cat ears that droop when you concentrate.
HT: Boing Boing and Japan Trends
Cool! But what the heck can these cool things cost?
If you know please give me an answer.
🙂
Cool, but how much do these things cost?
Take. Money. Now.
Even though these have no purrrrpose for me nyah!
Mood ring for 2011. I so want a pair!
Uh my gosh, I want these bad. For serious.
I hope this gets some market play, as the technology needs more development, what this is essentially is a very crude non-invasive BCI or Brain Computer Interface.
It is good to see it being marketed into toys, so far BCIs have primarilly designed for and marketed towards the medical industry. I remember one young boy, who had I believe a EEG BCI, that he used to move around a cursor on a simple monitor. The technology was underdeveloped because it was such a niche. The device, like these ears, worked by picking up on ”concentration” (remember to the brain, it isn’t really concentration its just intense amount of bio-chemical feedback in specific areas) and through practice and visual feed back, the user was able to direct the ”concentration” to signal where the simple cardinal moving cursor. (this was about 2002 or so).
In otherwords think about this way. Lets say you had the ‘ears’ on, and they where operated by independent signals and motors. Through practice in a mirror, you would be able to move up and down each ear independently. Well what is the difference between that, and turning nobs on an ‘etch-a-sketch,’ and actually if you flip your mouse over and pull the ball out you will notice that their is either two or three spinning axils, or two or three light sensors your mouse is essentially a very finely tuned etch-a-sketch.
So by marketing this way, we may actually get the price down, and think about other popular uses for it at first. Imagine playing a video game, where you are moving your avatar with your mind, leaving your hands free to hold onto a ‘gun’ to which you can independantly aim and shoot.
And as technology gets better and smaller their will be even more uses, for example; if your like me you have always kind of wish you had ‘terminator vision’ i mean not to know how to kill people, but rather like a pair of glasses with a heads up display, where by concentrating on a person you can pull up your personal data file on them like their name, how you met them, what they where doing last time you talked, no more awkward exchanges of reminding eachother!
But etch a sketch like control is just the beginning of BCIs, they keyboard for example is far more sophisticated than the mouse, and the actual human body far more sophisticated than either. BCIs potentially can harness that brain capacity, helping people who have issues communicating with others through disabilities, as well as say making immense human device relation problems a simple intuitive thing.
So go japan with your weird cat fetish, keep up the technological development! BCIs are super cool!
But, it says they stand up when you concentrate! heheheheh.
I totally want a pair just so I can see if my brain can make them seize with the 8093209478302985 different emotions I feel at any given time. I already get mocked for my excessive use of eyebrows.
I wonder if they developed the technology for a serious purpose, or was it just to get more people visibly in on their apparent cat-ear fetish.. lol.. also if it was a serious endeavor who said “Hey, lets make them cat ears!”??
I’m guessing you don’t watch much anime — if you did, you’d understand COMPLETELY why people want these. Not that I’d be one to actually wear them myself, but as a longtime fan of “Inuyasha” I can definitely see the appeal… 😉
From the same country that brought you sex robots and vending machines where you can buy panties. Japan, you are #winning.
Why?
Clearly this is for Cat People who have an embarrassing problem with effecting their transformation… this way, they can still go to family reunions and fit in, still give those important physical cues that all Cat People understand.
You can tell it’s Japan… are they seriously using an iPad instead of a mirror?
looks like fun. i want if only for fun drinking nights
Oh man, this is going to take cosplay to a whole new level!
I know what I’m getting for Christmas!!!!!
It’s worthless unless it comes with a matching tail!
WTF Japan. LOL 🙂