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OpenBCI is designing the Lego blocks; someone else will build the castle.

Making EEG-controlled novelties is one thing, but designing better medical devices to enable paralyzed people to move their wheelchairs, or locked-in patients to communicate, is a truly noble enterprise

We think virtual reality and augmented reality are the next big things—but we also know they won’t succeed without a good way to interac

Astute investors like Jorge Paulo Lemann, of 3G Capital, specialise in buying public companies and running them like private ones, with lean staffing and a focus on the long term.

But the most interesting alternative to public companies is a new breed of high-potential startups

The central difference lies in ownership: whereas nobody is sure who owns public companies, startups go to great lengths to define who owns what.

New companies also exploit new technology, which enables them to go global without being big themselves.

They can incorporate online for a few hundred dollars, raise money from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, hire programmers from Upwork, rent computer-processing power from Amazon, find manufacturers on Alibaba, arrange payments systems at Square, and immediately set about conquering the world.

“Ultimately, new technology can reveal desires that already exist on a deep level in society,” says Rafman of the works, which pull from and amplify the seductive forces of video games and cinema. “This desire to escape completely into another dimension has existed for a long time.”

Virtual reality’s recent resurgence in prominence begins with Oculus and its visionary 23-year-old founder, Palmer Luckey. In 2012, the then-18-year-old with an affinity for retooling defunct ’90s VR headsets took a hacked-together model to Kickstarter with a funding goal of $250,000. A month later, over 10,000 individuals contributed $2.4 million to the campaign for what was at the time mainly aimed at being a gaming peripheral. Two years later, Facebook wrote a check to buy Oculus VR for $2 billion

“This is not a drill. It’s real. It’s a moment,” says Michael Naimark, Google’s first resident virtual reality artist (like Char Davies, he’s listed as a pioneer of VR on Wikipedia). “And the arts community can play a huge role in propagation.

Throughout art history, art has reflected the prevalent social relations of the time. It makes sense, then, that the most relative and innovative art forms being produced today would mirror our reality—one defined by a perceived sense of agency in a world filled with invisible algorithms and clicks baited to us by past clicks. The internet spoils us with infinite choice: opportunities to invent our personas, refashion our self-brands, optimize our lives, and enhance our experience. But with mega-corporations quietly holding the joystick, can we really self-determine our destiny?