The NIA Experience

A subjective NIA experience

Man... this is a learning experience. Time is of the essence here, you'll need a lot of it to train yourself to utilize the device. First off, the headband: It must not sit too loose and no hair must be between the 3 sensors and your forehead. Fortunately it definitely isn't uncomfortable to wear.

OCZ recommends no less than 5 hours of practice, and I agree you'll (or at least I) needed a lot of practice... The tutorial index itself is made up of 18 individual sections, some of which only have text-based information. Be sure to go through them all to understand the device better. Really, you'll want to read the tutorial.

The NIA will distinguish four kinds of signals: alpha / beta brain waves and what medical EEGs call artifacts, signals from facial muscles and eye movements. The practice sessions are hard and it will take a lot of time to tweak this device perfectly. It's quite difficult.

The real challenge came with using the device. You have to be concentrated and focused. You need to learn to move you facial muscles, with your eyes look at places to trigger an activity. Inevitably the trick is to bind left/right controls to it. Even after hours of practice something as simple as pong was an incredibly hard thing for me to achieve. Over time though, you'll start to get a grasp at things and understand how it works.

The NIA also can monitor your alpha and beta brainwave signals... but to learn to integrate that into gaming, is a complete mystery to me. Fact is that in certain situations your brain will respond fairly repetitively, and you could assign a function to that. I was unsuccessful in achieving this though, too hard.

Also bear in mind that each time you put the NIA on, you must run the calibration utility in order to get the most out of it, as the sensors could well read a little differently creating a mismatched offset, though the calibration routine is a fairly easy process.

Gaming then; after successfully finishing a couple of matches in Pong I decided to configure Half-Life 2 with the NIA. And considering I am only able to control 'glance' and 'muscle' activity I mapped three functions. I assigned 'glance' to move left / right and 'muscle' to fire. Now, it does work but you really have to be very concentrated, which poses a bit of a dilemma for me with gaming. I'm a very active person. But granted, when it works, it works well... but when it doesn't it is frustrating. There were times for example that my muscle movement did not register properly, as such my gun did not shoot. Looking with my eyes frowning to the left or right made my character smash into the walls more often than I wanted to.

Then I fired up Counter-Strike: Source. Continuously applying the same mapped functions to train my brain and over a time frame of a couple of days more and more success was reached and felt familiarized. Once you are comfortable with everything the NIA starts to show the fruits of your hard labor, as you reach a point where there is some sort of consistency in your gameplay.

So overall the NIA definitely brings new functionality to the table. OCZ without doubt sparked a remarkable technological achievement here. But if anything, it's really difficult to accomplish. At least for this reviewer. When it works, it's a heck of a lot of fun.