If you’re anything like me, you’ve been in countless situations where your raid leader is yelling at you to “focus up” and “pay attention”. It’s something I’ve always struggled with, but at CES 2026, Neurable and HyperX have a concept gaming headset that might go some ways towards fixing that problem.
The gaming headset itself doesn’t really have a name yet, given that it’s still in its alpha phase, but what it has sensors in the earpads that can read your brainwaves, to track things like stress levels, focus and cognitive load. And what you’re able to do with that data is where the actual potential is.
Brain-Powered Gaming
When I tried on this prototype headset in Las Vegas, Neurable CEO Ramses Alcaide and Research Scientist Dr. Alicia Howell-Munson had me do a run on Human Benchmark’s Aim Trainer to get a baseline reading of my response time. I got a score of around 605ms – I never said I was good at shooters. But after that first run, they opened up a program that projected a bunch of dots rotating in a pattern that somehow represented my brain.
The goal, really, was to condense the dots down into a small focused circle by relaxing and hard-focusing on something, to essentially clear out my head. I sat back in the chair, took a deep breath and focused. And, well, I didn’t quite get to the “pure focus” point that’s intended. After all, it’s CES, it’s kind of hard to focus on any one thing right now.
But I did succeed in making the brain-dot-galaxy-thing smaller, which I’ll take as a small win. Then, after going through that process I was told to take the Aim Trainer test again, where I ended up with a slightly better score of 559ms. That’s an 8% improvement – not the best, but again, this wasn’t in the most ideal environment.
How Does It Work?
Traditionally, EEG sensors that track your brain waves have been these big, bulky, science fiction looking things, that you’d typically find in a hospital or laboratory. But over the last 14 years, Neurable has been working on a way to shrink that technology down to something that can be worked into headphones. This gaming headset isn’t the first time Neurable has done this, either. In 2024, the company teamed up with Master & Dynamic to make the MW75 Neuro LT, traditional headphones with the same EEG technology.
Those headphones were focused more on improving productivity, but the core concept is similar. Sensors in the earpads pick up EEG signals from your brain, which you can use to train yourself to focus better.
Usually, just having some sensors in the earpads wouldn’t be enough to pick up signals from all over your brain, and this Neurable headset is no different. Instead, it picks up the signals it can read from the sides of your head and uses an AI algorithm to infer activity elsewhere in your brain. It’s imperfect and probably not medically accurate, but for the purpose of training yourself to focus, it’s a good place to start.
Neither Neurable nor HyperX has announced anything close to a release date, price or even whether or not this will actually make it to market. But if there’s a headset that can help me focus after three hours of progression raiding, I’m at least interested.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
