Mind Reading Cat Ears Promise Endless Embarrassment
From the cybernetic labs of Japan come these moving cat ears, which purportedly adjust themselves in response to your thoughts or mood. In case you'd like to erase that last shred of privacy you retain inside your own brain.
Developer Neurowear showed off the ears, or "necomimi," in Tokyo recently; as you can see in the video above, trying them on can be a rattling (if entertaining) experience. One girl had trouble getting the ears to move at all, and no doubt she had to spend the rest of the afternoon explaining, "I'm not vacuous, I swear!" On other people, the ears seemed eerily good at foreshadowing facial and vocal expressions, leading the more poker faced among us to wonder if they don't give away too much.
Then there's skeptical Boing Boing, which wonders if these so-called mind reading ears aren't just reacting "to electrical impulses in head muscles, [like] Neurosky's 'Jedi Trainer' toys and Atari's legendary Mindlink." Way to spoil our fun, catty nerds. Pouts, cat ears turn pathetically downward.