I visited a Brooklyn lab where you can fly a small helicopter with your brain

Tanya Lewis/Business Insider

Jedi masters aren't the only ones who can move things with their minds.

For about $450, you can buy a 3D-printed headset that records your brainwaves and converts them into signals that can control everything from a robot arm to a remote-controlled helicopter.

And you don't need to have brain surgery to operate it!

A Brooklyn-based company called OpenBCI (short for brain computer interface) makes these headsets and sells them to students and hobbyists. And unlike most commercial products on the market, all of their software and hardware plans are open source.

I visited their lab in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to try it out myself. Here's what it was like:

OpenBCI's headquarters is nestled in a giant building in South Williamsburg, home to all kinds of bakeries, labs, and other businesses. The lab was a bit of a maze to find, but inside, it's a delightful mess of computers, 3D printers, and machining tools — with an expansive view of Manhattan.

Tanya Lewis/Business Insider

The company 3D prints the headsets right there. Each one takes around 25-30 hours to make. This one was in progress when I visited:

Tanya Lewis/Business Insider

Here's what the finished product — the "Ultracortex Mark III" — looks like. It's basically a helmet embedded with electrodes that pick up "EEG" (electroencephalogram) brain signals through your skull and send them to a circuitboard at the back known as the "Ganglion." It looked like something straight out of "Back to the Future."

Tanya Lewis/Business Insider

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