“It’s a fake!” Our favorite reaction was disbelief, as it showed that EEG tricks were still new. As if what we were doing was so amazing that it simply had to be just a magic trick. We only heard this about five times, though.

Most of the users simply thought the project was cool. Some were a little skeptical at first, but trying is believing. About 300 visitors tried the device and many more were watching (see Figure 3 and Figure 4).

Figure 3. Robot at Maker Faire 2011, San Francisco Bay area.

Figure 4. Attendees control our robot at Maker Faire.

We were surprised that it could work in a setting like that. Our prototype could handle hundreds of visitors. Also, the NeuroSky EEG headband was easy to put on and didn’t need any user training.

A couple of visitors had probably played with EEG before. They just noted “Yep, it’s a NeuroSky” and started talking about something else. Luckily, Brian Jepson had made a 3D-printed version of the soccer bot, so we had a backup gadget to amuse them.