The Emotiv device is a famous brain-computer interface. Recently the co-founder of the Emotiv Systems, Tan Le, showed the potentiality of her prototype at the TED.
I want to do a little question about the user experience of this kind of interface.
For example, moving objects with a touch screen, like the iphone, has a great affordance, because our natural interaction with the material world pass through movement and manipulation objects.
So, try to imagine the level of affordance if we just think a movement.
If in a touch screen we are in a user experience of interaction like manipulating a material object, with a brain-computer interfaces the experience is closer to move an arm.
The cognitive and psychodynamic effect on the users are not trivial.
There is a strong relation between emotions, motivations, desires and action.
If your presence in action (see the embodied cognition theory) can be in the same time material and digital, how could it change the relations between imagination and perception?
Ibridazioni 
First, I find fascinating the fact that touch interfaces are somewhat better in creating “direct manipulation” of objects, while removing the affordance of the keyboard (that now is worse).
Second, I’ve got a lot of doubts about those interfaces, but I’d like to be able to test and develop on one before having a more defined idea about it. The removal of phisical actions I think it’s a problem: I can’t avoid myself remembering the experiment of the kittens I saw during my lessons of Cognitive Psychology at the University: when you put one kitten moving in a room and another on top of it unable to move, but inheriting the movement of the bottom cat, the top one will have impaired abilities.
It’s probably not the same thing, but it’s still interesting. Also, it might just be that the neural controls are the right tool for just some kind of actions. 🙂
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The poor kittens were in first days of life, so the inputs had a particular influence on their brains.
Yes, we’ll need many researchs 🙂
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