NEWARK — Forget about flying cars. How about an automobile that reads your mind?

A group of students at Essex County College want to introduce you to the automobile of the future — or at least a prototype.

The college’s Computer Science Club yesterday publicly debuted what club president Jean Loizin describes as a car controlled by brain waves.

In just eight weeks, the club turned the sci-fi concept of telekinesis into a project that’s garnered the low-profile 17-member group some celebrity on campus.

“This is something that’s part of the future. I don’t think it’s impossible,” Karina Velastegui, 18, of Newark, said.

In recent years both scientists and companies have been applying similar technology across the globe. In 2011, German researchers devised a car simulator program that showed how a car reacting to brain waves saved precious milliseconds compared to a driver pressing the brakes. Toyota and Japanese researchers in 2009 unveiled an electric wheelchair prototype that moved according to the driver’s thoughts.

Wearing a light-weight headset, Loizin cleared a long walkway on the first floor of the Center For Technology and placed the retrofitted model car at one end of the room. The headset is outfitted with three metal sensors that detect changes in the brain’s electrical activity, with a sensor behind each ear and one touching the forehead.

Then he began to silently concentrate.

Jean Loizin, 22, checks the car before he demonstrates using brain waves to move the remote controlled car. Essex County College students design car of the future controlled by brain waves, not steering wheel. Members of the Computer Science club use a generic remote controlled car that they move with brain waves.

At first, there’s no movement. But suddenly, the red Mustang GT drives forward on the tile floor. As Loizin increases his concentration, the model car jerked forward and moved faster.

“As I show it around school, everyone wanted to try it,” said Loizin, 22, of Irvington, who as a youngster made a pastime of breaking appliances and reassembling them.

College president Gale Gibson dropped by the demonstration and took a test drive as students looked on.

“It scared me,” she said with a laugh. “It actually moved.”

Building the car didn’t cost them much, just $60, according to Ulysee Thompson, 29. He initially proposed the idea of a mind-reading car after noticing that eyes glazed over at club fairs when he talked about the activities of the Computer Science Club.

All the parts were fairly accessible, Thompson explains. For the brain wave-detecting headset, the club purchased a Star Wars Science Force Trainer, a toy originally designed to levitate a ball using a mind-powered fan.

Dismantling the device, the students placed the brain wave-reading receptor into a gutted remote control car and hooked it up to a palm-sized circuit board programmed to power the motor. Once the headset detects a person’s brain electrical activity — which grows the more you concentrate — a transmitter wirelessly relays signals to a receptor connected to the battery-connected motor.

Donning the headset, Velastegui closed her eyes and focused on a physics equation — and the car bolted some 30 feet across the room.

The more intense your concentration, the more electrical activity your brain creates thus propelling the car, Thompson said.

“You don’t have to be intelligent, you just have to think really hard,” Thompson said.

Along the way, he said, they made unexpected discoveries like learning that emotional reactions can generate just as much brain activity as complex thinking.

Ravi Manimaran, chair of the college Division of Engineering Technologies & Computer Sciences, said the project relied on existing technology of brainwave detection but the students added a novel twist by applying it to a car and figured out the circuitry and programming required.

While a mind-controlled car could present serious safety implications, Thompson says the same thought-controlled technology could successfully be applied to home conveniences like turning off lights or adjusting the temperature.

For now, the model car only drives forward and programming it to turn left or right is next semester’s challenge, said Velastegui, who will become president after Loizin graduates at the end of December.

“There’s a whole lot of things that can be done with this technology,” said engineering professor Gerald Aska said.

Newark students design car of the future controlled by brain waves 8 Gallery: Newark students design car of the future controlled by brain waves

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