Your phone isn’t the only cool thing you can press against your head. It might sound odd for a phone site to tell you that, but all manner of wonderful things have been built to press against your face and some are so awesome or terrible that we just have to tell you. Here we look at some gaming gadgets that really put your head into a different world.

1. The Atari Mindlink System

As far back as 1983 Atari were trying to project gaming brains into the screen. If you just said “Wait a minute, there wasn’t any mind reading technology in the 80s” the congratulations – you know more than Atari did. There was nothing even like mind-reading technology back then. In fact, even getting a computer to notice you via buttons was considered a major success. The “Mindlink” system promised to connect the player’s thoughts to the game, with a slight issue where “thoughts” apparently meant “eyebrows”.

Yes, the revolutionary Mindlink hardware simply tracked the muscle motion in the players forehead: detecting eyebrows moving individually for “left” and “right”, raising together for “seriously, is this all this does?” then furrowing harshly for “This is a piece of garbage!” Which is probably why it never made it to commercial release. Any peripheral that depends on the expressive ability of your eyebrows, thereby favouring anime characters over real people, is probably a bad idea. Add the fact that it worked by Infrared signals and how back then “Emissions standards” was just a phrase in science-themed pornos, this was probably literally as much fun as face cancer.

2. The Emotiv System

Twenty-five years later and gaming is ready for another go, and this time it might even work. The “Emotiv” gaming headset uses a network of fourteen sensors to detect electrical activity in the head and translate it directly in game motion. It’ll ship with a game based on “Mental Martial Arts”, where players can lift rocks with their mind, throw them around with but a thought, and basically use the Force in everything but (expensively copyrighted) name. The accuracy of the first models is apparently a little iffy, but once anything gets out of the lab and into the commercial sector it tends to evolve very quickly.

3. Army thought helmet

It isn’t just gamers who want to blow things up with their minds – the army wants some of that sweet neural action too. How much do they want it? Four million dollars much, the amount awarded to American researchers to work out how to give soldiers digital telepathy. The idea is for headsets which can detect the wearers thoughts and transmit them to other people, without the soldier actually having to “Say things out loud” – it turns out soldiers often end up in situations where audibly announcing their presence and plans is a bad idea. Who knew?

The makers insist that the system will only be used for communications, but once the organisation with missiles and guns starts playing with mind reading software it’s only a matter of time before somebody can blow you up with a thought. Be nice to them. The Army also has slightly more exacting standards about firing or not firing warheads so expect these systems to be a tad more accurate than the first commercial models. Then, like the jet engine, the very cool military tech can come out to play with the paying civilians.

The eventual potential for compact mind reading hardware for phones is almost unlimited. Even if you’re sensible enough not to connect your communications directly to your mind (we know we’ve thought MANY things we wouldn’t want the person on the other end of the line to hear), just being able to hold the phone to your head and auto-dial with a thought will make you feel like you’re in the future. Because you are.