This is pretty damn cool.

Engineers at NeroSky are working on a way to make biofeedback a viable part of next-gen gaming.

Right now the only thing they have to show for their work is a lightsaber that can only be lit up by wearing a special headset and concentrating on a single image, cool enough on it's own, but in the future the group hopes to expand on their ideas and bring the tech to video gaming.

Adding biofeedback to "Tiger Woods PGA Tour," for instance, could mean that only those players who muster Zen-like concentration could nail a put. In the popular action game "Grand Theft Auto," players who become nervous or frightened would have worse aim than those who remain relaxed and focused.

NeuroSky's prototype measures a person's baseline brain-wave activity, including signals that relate to concentration, relaxation and anxiety. The technology ranks performance in each category on a scale of 1 to 100, and the numbers change as a person thinks about relaxing images, focuses intently, or gets kicked, interrupted or otherwise distracted.

Another company, Emotiv, hopes to begin selling consumer headsets for gameplay by next year. A prototype of the device already hooks up to the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360.

New toys read brain waves [Yahoo! News]