Jason Dearen

Associated Press

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff.

“Three, two, one … GO!” the announcer yells, and as the racers fix their thoughts on pushing the cubes, the drones suddenly whir, rise and buzz through the air. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line.

The competition — billed as the world’s first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface — involved 16 pilots using willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida last weekend.\

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Organizers hope to make the event an annual intercollegiate spectacle, involving ever more dynamic moves and challenges.

“With events like this, we’re popularizing the use of BCI instead of it being stuck in the research lab,” said Chris Crawford, a doctoral student in human-centered computing.

Scientists have been able to detect brainwaves for more than a century, and mind-controlled technology is already helping paralyzed people move limbs or robotic prosthetics. But now the technology is becoming widely accessible. Emotiv and NeuroSky are among startups offering electroencephalogram headsets for purchase online for several hundred dollars. The models Florida racers used cost about $500 each.

Here’s how the technology delivers an abstract thought through the digital realm and into the real world: Each EEG headset is calibrated to identify the electrical activity associated with particular thoughts in each wearer’s brain — recording, for example, where neurons fire when the wearer imagines pushing a chair across the floor. Programmers write code to translate these “imaginary motion” signals into commands that computers send to the drones.

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Professor Juan Gilbert, whose computer science students organized the race, is inviting other universities to assemble brain-drone racing teams for 2017, pushing interest in a technology whose potential seems limited only by the human imagination.

As our lives become increasingly reliant on Internet-enabled devices, a concept known as the Internet of Things, Gilbert and his team want to know how mind-controlled devices could expand and change the way we play, work and live.

You might use your mind to unlock your car, or explore a virtual world, hands-free. It could be applied for real-time monitoring of our moods and states of consciousness. Researchers are studying whether they can use a big rig driver’s mind to trigger a device that will tell him when he’s too tired to drive.

“One day you could wear a brain-controlled interface device like you wear a watch, to interact with things around you,” Gilbert said.

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