San Francisco-based company Emoki are launching a line of motorized animal ears that “you control with your mind”!
“Emoki ears are designed to get attention, to draw people to come and speak with you, to initiate conversations and ignite new friendships. They’re unbelievably fun, and you’ll laugh with your friends as your ears react to your mood”, as per Kickstarter.
The Emoki team, led by Nick Hoffman and Hannah Masius uses – motorized ears — powered by NeuroSky brainwave technology and inspired by Japanese Neurowear‘s necomimi project — wiggle and move based on the user’s brainwaves.
This is how Emoki works –
- The forehead sensor listens to the body’s electrical signal, like a microphone.
- The ear clip acts as a ground and reference, listening to non-brainwave body electricity.
- The brainwave chip takes both signals and filters out all the electrical noise from the body and the ambient environment, honing in on brainwaves from 3-100 Hz.
- The chip’s internal algorithms convert the brainwave data to attention and meditation scores.
- Depending on one’s attention and relaxation scores, the servo motors rotate and wiggle.
Understanding the Ear Movement:
- Ears perk up – Attentive – single-minded focus, surprise, attraction – beta wave dominance.
- Ears droop down – Meditative – calm, relaxed, chill – alpha wave dominance.
- Ears wiggle back & forth – In the Zone – peak performance, excitement, calm focus – high alpha & beta.
- One ear up, one ear down – Calibrating – when turned on, the headset learns about the user.
An Emoki headset is completely safe to use as often as you like. It is available for the price of $129 and you can pre-order a headset that comes with one of a wide variety of ear styles and colors, including bears, foxes, bunnies and limited-edition yellow-and-black Pika (Pika Pika!). Why wait?!
