Raw Japan

Brain-powered travel

It may not look like much, but this run of the mill electric wheelchair runs on brainpower – no hands required.

Part of a joint project between Japan’s Riken Brain Science Institute and Toyota, the chair reads subject’s brainwaves and converts them into movement.

While I found the technology itself quite impressive, there’s little doubt that the brain-reading headgear won’t be making fashion headlines anytime soon.

Until recently, the amount of processing time between brainwaves and the actual motion had been the major stumbling block of these type of technologies.