[MichaelAO]

You hit the nail on the head as far as what I was thinking with the Rift.

After experimenting with binaural beats out of the Monroe institute, I think a similar auditory experience is important. You're definitely right that together they could be quite powerful. My email is in my profile if you'd like to chat more.

Right now, I'm leaning towards the Muse. Does anyone have any suggestions for a hacker friendly EEG?

[heynk]

I backed the indiegogo campaign with hopes that Muse would be very hacker friendly, but so far their SDK support is limited. They provide very low level interfaces for interacting with the data over bluetooth, but are behind scheduling on releasing their 'LibMuse' which promises to be a higher level SDK (in multiple languages) to help people build apps. I don't have links right now but after browsing their forums they seem to have de-prioritized their developer tools in favor of their own in-house apps. This is disappointing both as a developer who'd like to harness my Muse and as a consumer who wants to be able to do more things with my Muse than their single Calm app [1]

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/muse-calm/id849841170?mt=8

[kcoul]

Sounds good.

This was what I was referring to above, seemingly the most hacker friendly EEG of them all, and shipping in January: http://www.openbci.com/

My research indicated that monaural and isochronic patterns are more effective than binaural.

However, if binaural beats were synchronized with optic driving (an audio pulse arrives in the given ear at the same moment a photic pulse arrives at the corresponding eye), then this kind of integrated approach could certainly trump them both (and simple optic driving as well).