Neurocam is a camera you control with your brainwaves

Smartphones are seemingly the Swiss Army knife of the 21st century, able to accomplish anything from smell-o-vision to reading our brainwaves and compiling interest logs. Neurocam is an amalgamation of iPhone app and peripheral, that quantifies your brain in real-time to determine what interests you the most, then provides that information via fancy video log.

What at first glance appears to be an iPhone strapped to a user’s head, is actually a built-in EEG, or electroencephalography, headset that measures electric activity firing across the user’s brain; the attached iPhone itself is but the icing on the cake and what differentiates Neurocam from other mind reading headsets. Using a prism aligned closely to your right eye, the headset allows the iPhone to telegraph and record the exact image in your line of sight. Simultaneously, the EEG sifts through your alpha waves to gauge interest level between a range of 0 to 100. If that interest level surpasses 60 on the scale, then Neurocam creates a 5-second gif animation with the timestamp and location from the footage, storing it in an album for later usage.

By automatically filtering footage in this manner, the otherwise cumbersome and boring task of editing hours of “life-footage” is altogether eliminated and replaced with consumable bite-sized gifs. (Note, there are self-proclaimed “life-loggers,” people who record every aching moment of their lives.) Moreover, centralizing data capture and analysis on a single wireless device delivers unparalleled ease of access since users can amass hordes of introspective data with minimal effort.

Recorded gifs can serve as mini-time capsules to be uploaded and shared across social media

Alternatively, Neurocam can be viewed as a way of giving marketers direct access into what makes us tick, raising the ethical question of whether advertising will have a greater manipulative effect on our psyche or whether it will permit businesses to fine-tune their products and services to better suite our interests. Worth noting is that Neurocam is backed by the Japanese advertising giant Dentsu, but was developed by the Tokyo-based company Neurowear, the very Neurowear responsible for the Mico, an EEG infused pair of headphones that selects music based on mood.

Story via mashable