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13 February 2009
Article by Professor Allan Snyder FRS
12 February 2009
Polly Matzinger 从会问问题的女招待到世界闻名的科学家 [转载]
【 原文由 pico 于 Fri Mar 28 13:02:58 2008 发表 】
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Polly Matzinger，从会问问题的女招待到世界闻名的科学家
mdoctor
第一次听说Polly的故事，是在研一时免疫学的课堂上。何维老师在讲授
"危险模式"理论时，特意卖了个官子："大家知道提出这个理论的是谁吗？在
国际免疫学界可是一位传奇人物啊！"
Polly是一位极具个人魅力的女人。每次学术会议，只要有她的演讲，会场
总是爆满。而且，她曾经为Playboy工作过。当年她做学生时曾向JEM（国际权威
的免疫学杂志）投稿，只署了自己的名字。编辑认为这篇论文只有一个作者并不
可靠，怎么也得把老板的名字也属上吧！文章修回后，增加了一个作者。不久，
论文发表了。后来，Polly的一位同学，也是JEM主编的女儿拿着这篇论文，去找
她老爸说："您知道Polly后边的那个名字是谁吗？"主编说："不是她老板
吗？"女儿哈哈大笑："那是Polly养的小狗（一只阿富汗猎犬）的名字！"此
后，Polly被禁止作为主要作者在JEM上发表文章，直到那位编辑去世。
那篇发表在JEM上的论文：Polly Matzinger and Galadriel Mirkwood.
(1978). In a fully H-2 incompatible chimera, T cells of donor origin
can respond to minor histocompatibility antigens in association with
either donor or host H-2 type. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 148,
84-92.
就是这么一位传奇的女科学家，在1994年时提出了"危险模式"理论，引发
了免疫学界一场新的"革命"，堪称近10来免疫学最重要的理论突破。随着网络
的不断发展，能从网上搜集到的有关Polly的资料也越来越多。
Polly的经历非常特殊，在成为一名科学家之前，做过各种各样的工作，包
括爵士乐手、实验室技术员、训狗员以及Playboy俱乐部的"兔女郎"（Playboy
bunny）等。在她看来，"兔女郎"是一项"伟大的"工作（a great job）。而
在Playboy俱乐部的网站中，Polly也被列入著名的前兔女郎名录：
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/explayboybunnies/information/faq2.html
Dr. Polly Matzinger - world renowned immunologist.
Denver Playboy Club, 1969
不过，Polly的这些工作都干不了多久，她很快就会感到乏味。1972年她来
到加州Davis做酒吧服务生，同时也使自己有些时间来阅读、写作和从事动物工
作。
一天，Davis加州大学的两位教授来到这个酒吧。和往常一样，他们喝着啤
酒，讨论着动物拟态的问题。Polly问："为什么没有动物模仿过臭鼬呢？"
Robert Swampy Schwab教授，也是野生动植物、鱼类、菌类学系主任，竟然被问
得哑口无言。Schwab教授断言，这个"会问问题的女招待"应该成为一个科学家。
于是，他花了9个月的时间，到酒吧给Polly送去各种科学著作，使她相信科学是
永不令人厌倦的工作。1974年，Polly回到了学校，这年她已经27岁。2年后，
Polly获得了迟来学士学位。1979年，获得博士学位，终于开始了她永不觉得厌
倦的科学研究工作。她说，她终生感激那个（引导她走上科学道路的）人（I
owe that man my life）。
Polly目前在NIH（国立卫生研究院）的NIAID（国家过敏和传染病研究所）
领导着细胞和分子免疫学实验室的T细胞耐受和记忆研究部门。Polly给自己的实
验室取了一个奇怪的名字："幽灵（GHOST）"。
http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/labs/aboutlabs/lcmi/tCellToleranceMemorySect
ion/matzinger.htm
作为一名国际知名的科学家，Polly的文章并不算多，迄今为止在PubMed上
只能检索到不足70篇，但大部分发表在Nature系列（23篇）、Science（4篇）、
JEM（10篇）、Annu Rev（1篇）等顶级学术杂志上。Polly的研究性论文不多，
而大都是综述、评论、讨论，这也是理论免疫学家的一个特点。
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=search&db=pubmed&ter
m=(matzinger%20p[auth])
Polly的传奇经历，给我们太多的启示和思考。我们可以赞扬Schwab教授的
伯乐识马，也可以感叹Polly的的特立独行，还可以赞扬那个自由、平等、开放
的学术风气。如果没有Schwab教授，Polly恐怕永远只是芸芸众生中的一员，唯
一值得骄傲的，恐怕就只是曾经做赤戴着可爱的大耳朵和小尾巴的兔女郎。
其实，通过网络，我也有幸与Matzinger教授有过几次交流。研究生时，曾
将自己的实验与"危险模式"理论结合，用Email与Matzinger教授讨论过中其中
一些问题，很快就收到了她的详尽的解答和有关实验方向的指导。可惜，由于时
间和条件有限，我没能继续相关研究。
前不久，看到Matzinger教授在Nat Immunol上最新的一篇关于"危险模式"
理论的文章，于是再次向她去信，希望获得这篇文章的reprint。第二天，
Matzinger教授便给予了回复。显然，Polly已经不记得我这位3年前曾向她求教
的学生。她说："我对一位外科住院医师能对免疫感兴趣觉得非常惊讶。"同时，
她还附上另一篇几年前发表在Science上的相关的文献，供我参考。虽然实际上
我已经读过阐述"危险模式"理论的大部分文献，包括Science上的那篇，但是，
Matzinger教授此举，着实让我感动。她在用自己的行动，影响着每一个正在或
尚未走上科学之路的渴望科学的年轻人，就像当年Schwab教授带她走上科学之路。
Matzinger教授给我的回复：
From: "polly matzinger" <pcm@helix.nih.gov>
To: "**" <**@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: a reprint (or pdf) of your paper
Date: 2007年8月28日 18:22
hi
i am also sending you another paper about the danger model of immunity
(and the web supplement that went with it), just in case you have not
seen it. i am surprised that a surgery resident is interested in
immunity. good work!i hope you enjoy these, let me know if you can't open
them.
cheers polly
科学，对某些人来说，可能只是枯燥乏味的工作，而对另一些人来说，则可
能是永不令人厌倦的快乐的源泉。
我想，不管从事什么工作，只要能从中获得快乐，那便是成功。
说明：本文最早于2007-11-03发表于我的博客
http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/1401213573
http://xinguancha.blog.tianya.cn/
(XYS20080327)
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Tan Le on the Cover of Inc. Magazine
Tan Le on the Cover of Inc. MagazineDecember 1, 2008
The scientists at Emotiv have done the impossible: created a brain-wave-reading headset that lets you conjure entire worlds using nothing but your mind -- a breakthrough that could be worth billions. Now comes the hard part.
I'm sitting in a darkened room, attempting to move a large block with nothing but my thoughts. I stare at it intently and imagine myself physically tugging on it, trying to flood my mind with a sense of strain and determination. But the block doesn't budge. I try again, concentrating, concentrating: Move, damn you; I am your master. After a long moment, the block trembles a bit, then slowly skids toward me a few feet before stopping. Encouraged, I mentally bear down until the block resumes its sliding, and this time it keeps going. I'm gripped by the immensity of what I have just accomplished: effecting a change in the world around me without moving a muscle. Well, that's not entirely true. I may have squinted a bit.
This isn't a dream; it's science -- and soon, maybe, a big business. OK, the block was only a virtual one on a computer screen, but that's a nit. The same technology that converted my thoughts into action on the screen someday could be hooked up to a real-life backhoe, robot surgeon, or microwave oven, placing any of those objects at my mental whim. This thought-conversion technology is composed of some extremely sophisticated software and a piece of headgear that looks like a cross between a telephone headset and a skeletal bike helmet. Embedded in the headset are 16 electrodes that press lightly on my scalp, monitoring the electrical signals generated by the 3 pounds of toothpaste-like goo sealed in my skull. The signals are my brain waves, the stuff of thought and emotion. The headset passes the signals to the software, which extracts patterns that can be used to control anything that's run by electronics.
Brain waves usually are monitored in hospitals or research labs, but I'm in a conference room at a company called Emotiv, where a few dozen scientists have developed the gear and software that quite literally read my mind, allowing me to play a sort of video game with nothing but sheer thought. This is not a rough, spare-no-expense research and development prototype of some distant-futuristic product, but rather an upcoming stocking stuffer. For $299, you and yours will very soon be able to vaporize onscreen enemies with an angry thought, have your online characters smile when you smile, and see video games react to your level of excitement.
And that's just for starters. Backed by some impressive partners, Emotiv has a long-range strategy that sounds like a business-school case study from the 22nd century. After enabling us to control video games with our minds, Emotiv intends to let us control most everything else we do on our computers and, after that, what's around our homes. In 10 years or so, according to the company's co-founder Tan Le, we will all go around in a world that will respond to our mental commands. Fed by data wirelessly streaming in from a few freckle-size sensors embedded in your scalp, your stereo will know when you are feeling blue and what sort of music cheers you up. Movies will know when you are getting bored and cut to the action. Car advertisers will know when you are feeling the need for speed. Your doctor will know when you are depressed. Doors will open at your mental command.
Given all this, you might expect that Emotiv would be sitting pretty. But if you think building a mind-reading device is tough, try marketing one. It turns out the old saw about building a better mousetrap doesn't hold in the context of a product most people hesitate to believe is possible and aren't sure they want anything to do with if it is. And that has left Emotiv with a challenge every bit as big as conquering mind reading: figuring out how to present its breakthrough device to the world in a way that will transform it from a slightly scary gadget to the next must-have consumer technology. And Emotiv has to do it while taming persistent hiccups in the system, herding video-game producers into tailoring games to the device, and trying to halt a skidding launch date before competitors -- yes, there are other companies making mind-reading devices -- pick off pieces of the market. "Emotiv faces some crucial decisions it absolutely has to get right," says Stephen Prentice, an analyst at Gartner (NYSE:IT) who has sampled the company's device.
Le admits that such challenges are real. But once consumers give the headset a try, she predicts, a lot of the doubts will themselves be vaporized, and demand will snowball. "We see it becoming a totally ubiquitous device, allowing you to interact in a seamless way with everything else in the world," she says.
That grandiose strategy reflects the intensity and outsize ambitions of Emotiv's founders, and especially of Le. Her entire life has been a string of hard-won, improbable triumphs, and she is loath to lower her standards to anything less than spectacular. Going all in with Emotiv doesn't scare her. "When you start with nothing," she says, "you don't get attached to a lot of things. You end up unafraid to push outside your comfort zone."
It's not entirely true that Le started with nothing. She had a bottle of poison. Her mother kept the bottle and little else on the small, calamitously overcrowded boat on which she, 4-year-old Tan, and Tan's younger sister, grandmother, aunt, and uncle fled the Communist government in South Vietnam in 1981. At first, they had felt lucky to have avoided being captured and jailed. But floating in the South China Sea, they weren't so sure. Pirates were chasing the hapless vessels and picking them off one by one. Hence, the bottle of poison: Tan's mother was determined to grant her children a swift and relatively painless chemical end if their boat should be overtaken. "She didn't tell us about any of the horrible stuff, but she didn't have to," says Le. "You see the fear on people's faces, and you know."
The women and girls were kept in the stifling lower deck all day to make the boat a less appealing target, but they were allowed some fresh air late at night. On the fifth night, when the boat was out of fuel and passengers were down to their final rations, Tan, though she had been warned not to speak while above deck, couldn't resist remarking to her mother on the sudden appearance through the clouds of a wide patch of brilliant stars. "Those aren't stars," her mother gasped. "Those are lights." It was a British tanker steaming alongside. They were rescued and taken to a refugee camp in Malaysia. Three months later, they were given a choice of countries that were accepting refugees. Tan's mother had heard that Australia was a young country with a big future, so that's where the family ended up.
They settled outside of Melbourne, where Le's mother, still in her early 20s, picked vegetables and struggled to learn English in night school while raising her daughters. It's not hard to see why Le grew up with an unshakable belief in her ability to accomplish anything. Her mother, who went on to get a bachelor's and then a master's degree, started a cosmetics business and then a consultancy aimed at facilitating Australian-Vietnamese trade. In 1997, she became mayor of Maribyrnong, a suburb of Melbourne, becoming the first Vietnamese woman to be elected mayor anywhere outside of Vietnam.
Grateful that her family had been able to find a comfortable place in Australian society, Le grew up wanting to help others do the same. At 15, she joined an organization that aids Vietnamese immigrants. Smart, ambitious, and disciplined, she was elected the group's president at 18. Somehow, she also found time to complete her schoolwork and entered Australia's prestigious Monash University at 16. In 1998, Le, then 20, was named Young Australian of the Year, a highly publicized government honor that made her a national celebrity and put her on a speaking circuit, where she hobnobbed with prime ministers, scientists, and international captains of industry. That same year, she graduated with a combined degree in business and law.
Le took a job at one of Melbourne's most prestigious law firms, seeing it as a natural extension of her community service work. But by the time she was 22 and a full-fledged lawyer, she found she couldn't stop thinking about the successful entrepreneurs she had met. In particular, she was captivated by the high-tech moguls, some not much older than herself, who had the ability to forge new types of electronic ties that left people better connected to one another and to the world. "There was a technology revolution going on, and I didn't want to just be a facilitator," Le says. "I wanted to be part of the creating."
In 2000, as her restlessness was peaking, she delivered a speech at the University of Melbourne. Afterward, she was approached by a young Vietnamese student who was studying business and information technology on a scholarship at the nearby Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. This was Nam Do, like Le newly aspiring to high-tech entrepreneurship. The two hit it off so well that they decided to try to start a company, one that would give Le a chance to make her contribution to the connectivity revolution.
Their idea was for small bar-code scanners that could be built into cell phones so that consumers could aim their phones at products and get a text message back with product information and price comparisons. Telcos weren't interested in the bar-code part but were impressed with the high-speed text-messaging capabilities -- these were pre-American Idol-voting days, and mass text messaging seemed a novel idea. Le and Do sold licenses for the software and stuck in a clause that would allot them a modest-sounding five cents for every message handled by the system. Within a few years, their software was handling 150 million messages a month; you do the math. In 2003, Le and Do sold the company, which they had owned outright. They were 26, rich, and looking for a new -- and bigger -- idea.
Le knew where the pair could grab a little inspiration. A few years earlier on the speaking circuit, she had been at yet another dinner event, feeling a bit overwhelmed as a young Asian woman in a sea of suits, when she spotted another misfit -- a middle-aged man in cargo pants, with wildish hair tucked under a sideways baseball cap. This turned out to be the scientist Allan Snyder, who had a prestigious award of his own to boast about: the Marconi Prize, a near-Nobel-level honor he had been awarded for his role in the development of fiber optics. Snyder and Le got on well and stayed in touch. Le and Do went to dinner at Snyder's home, where he enthralled them with his work on using magnetic fields to stimulate human brains. He went on to bemoan the fact that the computer revolution had shut out emotions, which are, after all, what drive us. The industry had thrived on digital signal processors -- chips and software that could handle images and sounds. What was needed, insisted Snyder, was an emotional signal processor.
The notion rang every bell in Le's head. Snyder was describing a technology breakthrough, an entrepreneurial adventure, and a way to form an entirely new, world-changing type of connection. "We stayed up until 4 in the morning talking about it," Le recalls. "By the time we got together again a few months later, we realized none of us had been able to get the idea out of our heads."
In fact, Snyder had been approached by larger companies about developing his idea. But he liked the idea of starting a company with Le and Do. "There are magical qualities to both of them," he says. "I just had a strong intuition this could work with them in charge." Le brought in another friend: Neil Weste, a prominent Australian chip designer who had sold his last company to Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) in 2000 for several billion dollars. Among these four very successful partners, start-up capital would not be a problem for the new company, which they dubbed Emotiv. There was no shortage of strategic vision, either. "We wanted to bring to computers and the Internet all the facial expressions and emotions that are so important in our interactions with each other," Le says.
Emotiv's headquarters looks like that of any Web 2.0 start-up, which is to say it is a cluttered warren with mostly twentysomethings hunched over multiple monitors in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. But you have to meet only a few of these laptop lizards to realize that something unusual is going on here. One is an expert on facial expressions. Another has designed high-powered communications software. Yet another has produced best-selling video games. Smoke from a soldering iron wafts from a side room teeming with custom circuit boards. The payroll includes mathematicians as well as an evolutionary biologist.
And then there's the charismatic Le, now 31, who is a bit harder to characterize. She is comfortable shooting the breeze about the fine points of intellectual-property protection, the structure of the human cortex, and the future of the music industry, punctuating all of it frequently with an infectious laugh. But there are also flashes of a less easygoing, sharper-edged Le -- flaring, for example, at the suggestion that Emotiv can be compared with any of the countless start-ups that have set up shop nearby. "They may take on some technology risk in their development, but they know what they want to do is doable," she says. "Here, we're pushing the boundaries of what's possible."
Measuring brain waves, of course, isn't such a big deal. Electroencephalography, or EEG, machines that track the brain's electrical activity at the scalp have been around for the better part of a century. But the best EEG machines cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and for all that, they generally haven't been used for much more than measuring relaxation levels or detecting signs of life.
When they launched Emotiv, the partners figured there was no point in hiring established EEG experts, since the state of the art in EEG machines wasn't even close to what they needed. "We decided that we'd look at the whole landscape of science," says Do, "because there had to be something out there traditional researchers were missing." Ultimately, Emotiv decided to treat emotional signal processing as a sort of math problem that could be solved with clever software. Emotiv opened an office in Sydney and staffed it with mathematicians, digital signal processing experts, and artificial intelligence whizzes. To help keep R&D costs manageable, Emotiv leaned heavily on graduate students willing to work for free in exchange for having some exciting, cutting-edge research on their resumé.
The result was a software program that broke brain waves down into 90,000 components. It was so complex that running a single 10-second brain-wave reading through the program took six computers two days. And sometimes the two-day crunching session would be for naught: The brain-wave readings were so faint that just the electrical activity generated in an eye blink was enough to swamp them. To work well, the software had to learn to filter out the noise. "It was like listening to all the phone conversations in New York at once and trying to pull a few of them out," says Snyder. But the researchers made steady progress, and as they did, Le was quick to file patents; she eventually claimed some 25 that covered a range of processes.
In late 2004, after a day of particularly good progress, the group sensed it was close to being able to read a person's level of excitement in real time. No one went home that evening. Le, Do, and the research team pulled an all nighter; they took turns wearing a standard electrode cap -- sort of like a bathing cap coated inside with gel to improve electrical conductivity -- while watching movies, listening to jokes, arguing, and more, all while a graph on the screen tracked excitement. "By morning, we knew we had it," says Le. "We knew we were going to succeed." Without any champagne on hand and with the bars closed, the team members went to a coffee shop to celebrate, their hair glistening with conductive gel.
By now, I can move that block with ease. I'm ready for a new challenge: making something happen onscreen that has no real-life analog. In this case, I'm to make that same damn block vanish into thin air. What am I supposed to think and feel? Disappear isn't part of my mental repertoire. It's suggested that I stare at the background scene and visualize it without the block. I conjure the image in my mind and focus on making it vivid. The block flickers. I sear the blockless image into my brain, and just like that, the block is gone. Who knew I had the ability to concentrate in such deadly ways? Now for some easier fun. An animated face comes up on the screen, and I'm told to make faces. As I grin, the face grins; it matches my frown, blink, wink, and eyebrow arching. I'm a cartoon! I feel as if the headset is helping me realize fantasies I didn't even know I harbored.
Le and her colleagues were just as tickled when they found they could perform similar feats. But they soon realized they now had a serious decision to make, one they had been putting off while the very feasibility of the project was in play: What do we do with this? Hit the market with an expensive device that would sell in low volume? License the technology to one or more big companies? Or somehow figure out how to bring the costs down enough to sell to a mass audience? The co-founders had been dreamily discussing the possibilities all along, but now they met to formally choose their future. "Nam and I were very excited about the opportunities around licensing, but then Allan said to us, 'We don't want to make money doing this,' " recalls Le. "Nam and I rolled our eyes, thinking that this was typical scientist talk. Then Allan added, 'We want to make a lot of money.' " They all laughed, but the point was clear: They had all seen success in past exploits. Why bother to do this if they weren't going to go for the jackpot? They decided to shoot for the mass market.
The strategy is counterintuitive, to say the least. "The best beachhead strategy for a new technology is one that demonstrates that the technology works, is highly valued by the customer, and gives you a high margin," says Jerome Engel, executive director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. The transistor, for example, was first brought to market in 1952, when it was used in hearing aids. Customers were grateful rather than finicky, marketing was fairly simple, and the revenue funded expansion into bigger markets. Emotiv, in fact, is working with a wheelchair company to develop a thought-controllable device for those who can't move their body. But that's a sideline. The company's biggest bet remains squarely on consumers -- which Engel finds risky. "If you go for a consumer market first," he says, "you're racing against limited resources, you need to get a lot of partners, and you need to have a very sexy product that delivers exactly what unforgiving customers are looking for. These guys made a choice that carries a huge risk."
The decision to shoot for a mass market immediately led to another: The one market that seemed ripe for a large-scale invasion of innovative interface technology was the video-game industry. "Better and better graphics had reached a point of diminishing returns, while there had been almost no innovation in controllers," Le says. "And gamers tend to be early adopters, making them a good incubator for a new technology." Emotiv opened a new headquarters in San Francisco, placing it close to the heart of the gaming industry, while keeping an R&D team in Sydney.
With a market in mind, Emotiv could now pin down the details of its device. Gamers weren't going to wear a gooey bathing cap, so the team came up with a rigid, relatively unobtrusive, even cool-looking headset able to get an accurate brain-wave reading with 16 gel-free sensors instead of the 128 sticky ones in a standard EEG cap. The headset was augmented with a tiny gyroscope to track head motions and a wireless transmitter to free the wearer of wires. More important, the software's brain-wave-interpreting capabilities were improving by leaps and bounds. The software would eventually be able to differentiate among 30 of what the company characterizes as mental states, roughly divided into three categories -- emotions, facial expressions, and actions. All three types of mental states would be critical: Actions would allow controlling what a character does, facial expressions would convey feelings and intentions to fellow online players, and emotions would allow a game to respond to how a player was feeling. A plot could change when you were bored, a virtual character could appear more often if you found him engaging or threatening, music or lighting could shift to complement your mood.
The technology worked, but it didn't work perfectly for everyone. Some users had more trouble than others sending out consistent, identifiable signals, even after running through a training session. And that, says Le, was a shadow hanging over the future of Emotiv. "If we let something seen as half baked get onto the market, it would be a disaster," she says. "We have an opportunity to revolutionize the way people interact with technology. But we won't get a chance to do that unless we provide the right experience in the beginning."
To make the device easier and more fun to use, Emotiv's team worked furiously with a small video-game-development company called Demiurge Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to embed the technology in a gamelike context. Instead of a boring training session, an Asian sensei walks you through an exotic introduction to your new powers. He gets you to grimace at annoying flying creatures to make them flee, to lift heavy objects, and more. This acclimation process gives the software a chance to record your brain waves and trains you to use them consistently before it throws a series of increasingly difficult challenges at you, such as reconstructing simply via thought a fallen bridge needed for a mystical journey while a fiery sky changes hue in response to your emotional state. Another mini game teaches you to hurl thunderbolts.
The market seemed to break in Emotiv's favor with the success of the Nintendo Wii, which lets users wield game controllers like rackets or steering wheels; the Wii's popularity suggested a real thirst for new sorts of interfaces.
And so, buoyed by early results with test subjects, Emotiv decided to take a chance and unveil a prototype in February 2008, at the closely watched Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. There, new video games and accessories can pick up buzz or sink under the gaming community's disdain.
On the show's opening night, with thousands of attendees and reporters in the audience and video cameras rolling, an Emotiv team member named Zachary Drake attempted to move a cube and more, which by this point was something anyone at Emotiv could do in his or her sleep. But for the first time since the team's big breakthrough, the device, which the team had named the Epoc, simply stopped working. Clearly rattled, Drake gamely tried again and again to work his will on the screen, his face a knot of concentration, his arms reaching out plaintively. For a moment, the crowd was silent. "I think people cringed for us," says Le. Then, the murmuring and snickering began. "Welcome to demo hell, folks," Drake said.
The Emotiv team later learned that a powerful wireless network at the facility had wiped out the connection between the headset and the PC. That the demo might fail had never entered Le's mind, and she just stood there, stunned: "We had done so many dry runs and had never had a problem. I was so shocked. I was speechless." The debacle led to widespread ridicule of the company -- "The Force Is Not Strong With Emotiv's Epoc," "Watch Emotiv's Performance Anxiety," and "The Trade Show and Demo Hall of Shame" were among the headlines on gaming sites.
On the other hand, more than 300 people gave the device a shot at the company's booth, and by almost all accounts, it was a big hit and worked well for virtually everyone who tried it. The company was encouraged enough to set a product launch time frame of the 2008 holiday season. The plan was to sell the headsets through game and electronics retailers, as well as online. Meanwhile, competitors were massing. CyberLearning Technology in San Marcos and OCZ Technology in Sunnyvale, for example, have both developed neural headsets. Hitachi in Japan has poured money into potential mind-reading products, and dozens of universities have made efforts to develop better, cheaper thought processors, any of which could lead to spinoffs. There's even an ambitious project funded by the U.S. military, which hopes to have patrolling soldiers communicating by thought within two decades.
But most notably, there's NeuroSky in San Jose, which has developed a single-electrode game-control headband. NeuroSky's device can detect only two mental states -- attention and meditation. But at a projected $50 or so, it is about one-sixth the price of Emotiv's. And for games, at least, keeping it simple could turn out to be an advantage. "People can use ours right away without training," says Greg Hyver, NeuroSky's vice president of marketing. "You can add on all the features you want to a headset, but if people can't use it right out of the box, they won't use it at all." At a conference in October, Square Enix demonstrated a zombie game that uses the NeuroSky device, and Sega is considering releasing a toy sword or a game based on the technology.
Meanwhile, a company called EmSense is making inroads into the corporate market with a headset that measures the reactions of consumers to games, ads, and other entertainment and marketing creations. EmSense hopes to provide its clients with a detailed, high-tech analysis of what flies with what types of consumers. Coca-Cola used EmSense last year to help fine-tune its Super Bowl advertising decisions. That's a business Emotiv wants to be in on as it moves beyond gaming, and no wonder. Says EmSense CEO Keith Winter: "The market research business is worth billions. It's an ocean. Gaming is a pond."
Le and her teammates have tried these rival systems and remain confident they don't come close to the Epoc's capabilities. Still, Emotiv decided in September to postpone the rollout. Why? Because it can, Le says. She insists Emotiv's technology edge is insurmountable. She also says funding isn't a problem, at least in the near term; the company raised $13.4 million in a round of financing in 2007 -- the Australian government chipped in, along with three venture capital firms. "Trying to make the Christmas time frame just wasn't necessary," she says. "We don't have to risk the whole business trying to meet an early delivery date." Le even suggests that delaying the product could prove to be a smart marketing move. "We want pent-up demand," she says. "We've already got 5,000 preordered through our website. After we deliver a good experience to those early customers, we can talk about making tons of them for next Christmas." The company hasn't announced a new launch date, but Le says the headset will be out in 2009.
Meanwhile, the team continues to think beyond games. The headset already can be used to control most ordinary functions in common software, such as word processing and spreadsheet programs, by taking the place of a mouse -- the cursor simply follows your gaze, and you can think your way into triggering the equivalent of a left or right mouse click. Not only might that be a critical tool for people who may have trouble working a mouse, but it might end up feeling a lot more natural for the rest of us. The technology could be applied to entertainment, Le says, noting that wearing a headset while listening to music or watching a video would allow your computer to track what you like and dislike down to individual choruses or scenes, and start automatically tailoring what it serves you, perhaps via a website -- a sort of brain-powered iTunes that Le hints she would like to see Emotiv own. The headset could help educators who work with children who have autism or attention deficit disorder. Social networking sites could use emotional feedback from the headset to create compatible online gatherings or even assist in matchmaking. Well, maybe. "Love is tricky to identify in brain signals," Le allows. "I'm not sure we know how to tell it apart from lust."
Some powerful partners have come on board. IBM (NYSE:IBM) is working with Emotiv to develop a corporate version of the headset that would allow, for example, virtual conferencing with avatars that represent people's expressions and feelings -- so you would know who was engaged, who was bored, who was laughing at your jokes, and, maybe, who was pretending to laugh. Ketan Paranjape, chief of technical staff at Intel, says the chip giant is interested in enlisting Emotiv's headset to navigate via thought three-dimensional representations of corporate data -- the company featured Emotiv prominently at its annual conference for developers. "We think neural devices will be the next interface," he says.
And that brings us, hypothetically, to the day when we are all wearing Emotiv hair plugs, our thoughts and feelings productively ricocheting through our homes, offices, and, through the Internet, the whole world. That's Le's vision, anyway, and she is almost dismissive of lesser goals. "We don't want to be some niche company providing a specific solution to a specific problem," she says. "We have an opportunity to create an industry that will revolutionize the whole framework of technology."
That may well happen. But first, she has to give the world a chance to move that block mentally, before someone beats her to it.
Contributing editor David H. Freedman is a Boston-based freelance writer.
[URL: http://www.allianceofceos.com/press/member_news/2008/the_scientists_at_emotiv_have.php]
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