The Biomedical Engineering Laboratory at Keio University has been up to some cool stuff. They recently announced that they were able to control a Second Life avatar using an electrode-filled headset that monitors the motor cortex and translates the data into control inputs for a Second Life avatar. You can see this technology in action in this video.

So how would this all work and what would it mean for Second Life? I'm going to take a stab at it and say ... this is huge.

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) isn't a new technology as scientists have been researching BCI to help the physically paralyzed for years. But most BCI experiments have come from invasive implants that target specific areas of the brain with better signal resolution. Not surprisingly, asking the user base of a virtual world to accept a brain implant poses some difficult marketing challenges. Fortunately, using the electroencephalogram (commonly known as the EEG) as a non-invasive method of getting brain inputs may eventually create a marketable input device for the masses, albeit with some challenges, for example the BCI using an EEG requires training.