The folks at OCZ have been talking for a while about a device known as the Neural Impulse Actuator, which employs several sensors embedded in a headband to read certain electrical impulses from the wearer, theoretically acting as a PC input device. Our own Cyril Kowaliski even got to try out the device at Computex last year, affording us a priceless opportunity to publish a picture of him wearing a headband.

Last week at CES, I got an update on OCZ's progress with the device, courtesy of Dr. Michael Schuette, OCZ's VP of Technology Development. Dr. Schuette has teamed up with the inventor of the device to improve it and prepare it for release as a product.

The concept behind the device is, in its way, relatively simple. The headband has a trio of sensors across the front, and those sensors read electrical impulses in various frequency ranges, which equate to a number of different facial movements and—so it would seem, at least—patterns of thought. Dr. Schuette said the original interface for the headband was a simple RS-232 serial connection, and the software reading the inputs was single-threaded. OCZ has now converted the hardware to a USB connection and has developed a new, multithreaded software layer that uses DirectX to process inputs. The difference, Schuette claimed, is substantial. The DirectX input mechanism is much quicker, and the software can use multicore CPUs to handle the mathematical tasks like fast Fourier transforms needed to interpret the signals from the headband's sensors.