Mind powers offbeat tech

LAS VEGAS – A motorized, seatless unicycle, a video game you control with your eyes, and a mind-reading headset that serves as a game controller were among the more bizarre gadgets being shown off at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show.

Some 3,100 exhibitors attended the show, and although there were plenty of mainstream technologies on display, the show attracted a fair share of offbeat gadgets. Here’s a roundup of some of the weirdest devices:

• FOAM FIGHTERS. Toy companies are eager to link their products with smartphone and tablet games, creating toys that are an amusing blend of virtual and real. Foam Fighters are made of two sheets of thin foam, painted and shaped like World War II fighter planes such as the famous Mitsubishi Zero. Toss them in the air, and they fly like paper airplanes. Better yet, you can attach them to a plastic arm with a suction cup that, in turn, sticks to the back of an iPhone, iPad or Android phone, right next to the camera. The airplane shows up on screen, and if you download a free app, the fighter plane will look like it’s zooming around in war-torn skies, controlled by the movement of the phone or tablet. Foam Fighters go on sale in April. A pack of two, with a stand, will cost $10.

• HAIER BRAIN WAVE. The Chinese appliance company brought this wireless mind-reading headset to the show and demonstrated how it could be used to control a TV set. It holds one sensing pad to the wearer’s forehead and another that clips onto an earlobe. The big limitation is that the mind-reading capability (actually just measurement of brain waves) is crude. The set can only be used to sense if the user wants something to go up or down. For any other direction, you need the remote. In a demonstration of a simple mazelike game, the wearer guided a figure up or down with his mind, and right and left with the remote. Haier said it’s developing something that lets the wearer change channels by thinking about it.

Haier is selling the set in China, but has no plans to bring it to market in the U.S.

Eventually, this could be a dream come true for the laziest of couch potatoes.

• EYE ASTEROIDS. Continuing on the theme of controlling electronics without moving, Swedish company Tobii brought its eye-controlled arcade game to the show. To play, you stand in front of it and look at a screen, where asteroids hurtle toward your battle station. It shoots laser beams at the asteroids you look at, destroying them. So yes, looks can kill.