cyborg

I've had one of these (the develper version) for a while. The reviewer has not been entirely fair! The damn thing works - but the user has to train quite a bit more than the reviewer seems to have. Spend a few hour playing with it and you start to get it. Scrunch up your face or strain too hard and it won;t see your brainwaves - only your muscles.
Let's go through it. Expressiv (the facial expressions) does not need to be trained at all. It does a passable job of working out your expression and it works in real time. The avatar on screen looks like a slightly hyperactive version of your face. He didn;t mention Affectiv at all - the software tracks your emotions (or some of them - excitement, meditation and engagement). Cognitiv (the magic Jedi stuff) is fabulous and works ok almost immediately, but you need to spend a bit of time to get it going. A few hours of playing is all it takes. Hell, who wants a flashy new brain interface that doesn't take a bit of skill to use?
As for the sensors falling out all over the place, he obviously didn't read the troubleshooting sections on Emotiv forum. Check it out - this is super easy to fix!
Now for the killer - you can link all these detections to keystrokes that can fire up your existing games. Smile, and you can send :-) to your avatar in Second Life. Think LIFT and you can type the levitation spell in your Harry Potter game. Check out the Emotiv user forum for other games - someone is even playing Portal.
The Cortex Arcade app is a third-party application. The game that comes with the Emotiv is called Spirit Mountain. It's not too bad toshow what the tech can do - the background colour links to your excitement level, sound gets louder, softer, faster and slower with your mood, and there are a few cool mind training activities.
Now to blow you away, one of the developers has hooked the EPOC up to a 5-axis robot arm. Check out the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Cq35VbRpTY
This thing is super-cool. Just takes a bit of getting used to. From a standing start I can get into a game in less than 2 minutes. Not exactly plug and play, but not as bad as 5-10 minutes as the reviewer said.
And it really reads brain waves.You can freeze your face and muscles, talk, pull faces, whatever, and the detections still work fine.