Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

By Paul Bisceglio

Boingo Wireless teamed up with Google Offers this week to launch free wireless internet in six Chelsea subway stations. According to the New York Times, Google will foot the bill for the service this summer until September 7, after which Boingo expects to find other sponsorships to keep the underground Wi-Fi free. Boingo aims to cover 36 subway stations with its wireless service by the end of the year, and 270 stations in five years, which sounds like a cause for celebration for corporate rank climbing workaholics, blog addicts and nypress.com readers alike. Before we pop the Youtube video of champagne, though, we have to ask: does it work?

With laptop in backpack, I jogged downtown yesterday evening and hopped into each of the six stations to test things out. At every stop, I opened an article on nypress.com, logged into my e-mail (Gmail), searched for the location of the station on Google Maps and watched the HD music video for “Call Me Maybe” – pretty much everything I’d do with internet on a normal commute. Then, I made up some categories and rated them in wireless service bars (like the ones on the bottom right of your computer screen, 0 = bad, 5 = good), including the actual number of service bars themselves. Check out the results below.

(Note: 1. I used a 2010 Samsung Notebook that has slowed down with age, so my evaluations do not reflect the performances of today’s fastest computers, I-pads, I-phones, Androids, etc.; 2. I sat by the underground gates at each station but never paid to enter, so results may vary when you are right next to the tracks.)

C, E Station at Eigth Avenue & 23rd Street

Service Bars: 3-4 bars
Seating Availability: 2 bars
Lighting: 2 bars
Cleanliness: 2 bars
Ambiance: 1 bar

Static sights like nypress.com were easy to navigate here, but once I started piling on the tabs and blasting the Carly Rae Jepsen things started to stop and stutter. If I ever get locked in this station with my laptop for a day (and manage to find an outlet), catching up on American Ninja Warrior on Hulu is going to be a pain in the ass. This station was no smellier than a usual one, but boring white walls, cramped space, dim lighting and sparse benches along the track made it less than ideal for relaxed web browsing.

A, C, E Station + L Station at Eighth Avenue and 14th Street

Service Bars: 3 bars
Seating Availability: 4 bars
Lighting: 5 bars
Cleanliness: 4 bars
Ambiance: 4 bar

Oddly clean and exceptionally bright, these two connected stations had it all — except for decent wireless service. Getting serenaded by an elderly a cappella group helped me almost tolerate Google Maps’ pixel by pixel loading, so I hope that service improves just enough once you go down to the tracks to make surfing the web at this station actually enjoyable.

1, 2, 3 Station + F, M, L Station at Seventh Avenue and 14th Street

Service Bars: 5 bars
Seating Availability: 3 bars
Lighting: 5 bars
Cleanliness: 2 bars
Ambiance: 4 bar

Good service and good lighting at this one, though a lot grimier than the previous. Outside the gates the hallways are crowded and have no seats, but alongside the tracks there is decent space and a number of benches. I sat outside the gates on a green Greenline: A Textron Company storage bin and no one seemed to mind. Hummed along to a Steel Drum band’s rendition of “Eight Days a Week” while zipping through my e-mail.

1, 2, 3 Station + F, M, L Station at Sixth Avenue and 14th Street

Service Bars: 0-5 bars
Seating Availability: 1 bar
Lighting: 2 bars
Cleanliness: 2 bars
Ambiance: 1 bar

This is a strange, circular shaped set of stations with both local trains and PATH trains to New Jersey. It’s cramped and dingy, and has a very limited wireless range: I found no signal at all when in one corner, then a full set just down the hall next to the ticket / information box. With nowhere to sit, I crouched against the wall to browse, and got accosted by a homeless dude for holding a piece of paper in my mouth as I typed.  He claimed it was “not rational behavior.” The paper in my mouth, I disagree — I had nowhere else to put it. Spending piles of money to blanket the city’s underground with wireless so that we all can spend 20 more minutes each day in front of a screen, on the other hand — well I’m not so sure.

It felt a little strange the first time I put it on. The battery pack on the headset was light as the single AAA inside, but its square weight ove my ear wasn’t, like, uncomfortable? Just maybe unnatural. Once I got the Neurosky Mindwave Mobile set up, though—and started controlling my computer with my brain—it was sort of very awesome. Actually kind of totally awesome.

The Mindwave Mobile is the first Brain Computer Interface (BCI) controller to work on Android and iOS as well as Mac and PC. Unlike the company’s previous first: The First Affordable BCI Headset, the $99 Mindwave, the Mobile version uses Bluetooth to wirelessly communicate with your computer. The active tech about it is a dry sensor that reads changes in the brain’s electrical activity like what’s up with Electroencephalograms (EEG). Traditional EEGs would need an electrically conducive goop smear where sensor meets scalp. Which, obviously, what a pain, right?

Right. Okay, so it’s easy—enough—to use. Even though sometimes it would slip on my head and whatever I’d been doing would be suddenly not done. And what was I doing, you ask? Well there’re a few games bundled up with the unit. A title called Zombie Pop was surprisingly fun. Basically one of those carnival games where you shoot water in a clown’s mouth till a balloon pops. Except you inexplicably work in some sort of Zombie factory, and they’re coming down a conveyor line, and instead of water you have to focus your brain might towards inflating their ugly green heads. When they get big enough you blink and a needles swings down and pops their heads like…like…like flesh balloons at a Zombie Carnival, I suppose.

No. It wouldn’t be fun save for the fact that—yes—the controls are your damn brain! WTF? The Mindwave Mobile reads two mental states, attentive or meditative, and eye blinks. So. If you can imagine if early Nintendo had first released a console whose controller was a d-pad with only two directions and then a single button, and you’re a game developer and they ask you to make a game and you’re, all, “Well, sure, man. I can make that game, but have y’all consid—” But they say just do it, and so you do, then now you understand the limitations of the games available for the Mindwave. Though it does sort of surprise me that no Pong clone is available yet. Since that’s probably exactly what our hypothetical game designer would have come out with.

Maybe the issue there is that switching your mental state isn’t so easy as thumbing a joystick. See, for me it was super easy to hit the ‘meditative’ state where you’re not quite focused on any one thing (this will come as no surprise to my teachers in elementary school), but, for my roommate who helped me test the headset, he could snap into ‘attentive’ no problem. The brief tutorial advised me to try thinking of song lyrics in my head so that I’d be focused on something. This works. But, of course, when one is thinking of lyrics one is not thinking about playing a game.

Even this petty hardship though has some benefit—and until some more engaging titles are dropped this might be the best justification for paying $130 for the Mindwave Mobile—because, when you actively switch your focus on and off with this sort of direct feedback over and over, it becomes easier to do each time. It really does. After a few sessions of Zombie Pop I no longer had to invoke Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now—the only song I could conjure at the time—and really started laying waste to some zombie domes, as though some stunted mental mage, with my brain forces alone.

Some developers have tried to exploit this direct feedback with educational apps—like Imagercize ($6), Math Trainer ($0), and Focus Pocus($149?!)—designed to help students understand what it feels like to be in their best mental state. The potential for this is great. Like, drop the Ritalin, kids. Learn to tighten your thinking caps instead.

If I were the future billionaire who figured out how to market BCI headsets like the Mindwave Mobile my calendar would be all power brunches with SAT prep centers. That’s what’s up.