Scalextric-style slot cars that can be controlled with your brain -- going faster the harder you concentrate -- were demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show. Attendees at the technology event -- held in Las Vegas in the US -- wore headbands based on medical brain-scanning tech to race model cars about a track. The company behind the mind-reading technology is Massachussets-based firm BrainCo, which grew out of Harvard University's Innovation Lab. The slot car setup worked by using the Focus1 headbands to non-invasively measure participant's brain activity and transfer this to a paired model car on the racetrack. The technology is based on conventional electroencephalograms.

Autonomous model cars will race against one another in a contest designed to test different software approaches. The contest is being organised by researchers at the University of Essex in the UK, who are creating an affordable and standardised autonomous vehicle kit to encourage others to get involved. The kit will include a high-end commercial model car, a laptop, a GPS receiver, a USB controller and a camera. The aim is to encourage different research teams to develop autonomous racers using the same equipment, which will then race against one another at the 2008 World Congress on Computational Intelligence in Hong Kong. Simon Lucas of Essex University says the competition will be similar to the DARPA Grand Challenge (see Desert racers – drivers not included), which involves full-sized vehicles, but will be far less prohibitive.

The Audi Q2 'Deep Learning Concept' is no ordinary model car. And if you could, we suspect the cost would be well beyond the means of your average doting parent. This is because it uses something called'machine learning' to autonomously search for and park itself in scale parking spaces. Machine learning is exactly what it sounds like – when a machine learns something without being programmed. The Q2 has two mono cameras plus ten ultrasonic sensors – these send signals to an onboard computer, which then sends signals to the steering and motor.