Raul Rojas and his artificial intelligence team at the Free University of Berlin, have created a car that uses a Emotiv’s mind-reading EPOC headset (usually used for gaming) as the key component in their BrainDriver project.

Last year, Rojas and his colleagues developed EyeDriver, a car you control with eye movements. That got them thinking about using the human mind to control a vehicle directly.

Using off-the-shelf parts to control the autonomous Volkswagen Passat–the car responds to rudimentary commands like left, right, accelerate, decelerate, and stop. Sixteen sensors measure the brain’s electromagnetic signals and sends them to a computer that translates them into directions. The car isn’t very fast but it brings them one step closer to the day where passengers simply go along for the ride in vehicles that drive themselves.

Rojas and his team plan to demonstrate BrainDriver with a real-world test in Berlin traffic later this year.

BrainDriver