THE MIND-CONTROLLED, BEER-POURING ROBOT
What if you could pour a beer using your mind? Well, now you can.
Enter the world of EEG powered beer pouring robots, brought to you by Thirsty Thoughts
In the Summer of 2017, a serial entrepreneur, robotics expert and neuroscientist walked into a Bristol bar for a Sunday afternoon drink and catch up. A year later, they walked out with the first fully functioning mind-controlled beer pouring robot, Homer.
Homer utilises EEG technology, which allows us to track electro-pulse activity in a participants forehead and ascertain how focused they are. We then translate that data into how well their pint is poured. Simply put, a frothy mind = a frothy pint!
Four years after Homer’s inception, having poured over 10,000 mind controlled pints, Homer finds itself on its third iteration. With each iteration comes a slicker robot with higher functionality, better gamification and more sophisticated technology as the driving force behind it.
HOW IT WORKS
CASE STUDY - MARRIOTT AND TEDx BERLIN
In this age of wandering minds and fleeting attention spans, TEDx’s theme of “Focus” has never felt so timely. It was under the influence of this theme that Marriott and MEC decided to use Strange Thoughts’ mind-controlled beer pouring robot to provide a lively entertainment piece that rewards focus with an ice cold pint of beer!
Guests of the event were greeted by two fully branded Marriott robots under a banner stating “Need a cold beer? All you need to do is focus!”. As guests lined up, one-by-one they wore an EEG headset, measuring their concentration which controlled the quality of the beer. Frothy mind = Frothy beer. Throughout the day guests of the event poured just under 200 pints of “Mind Beer” and journeyed home with newly acquired skills of a jedi.
