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A Game You Can Control With Your Mind
When you pull the headset over your eyes and the game begins, you are transported to a tiny room with white walls. Your task is to break out of the room, but you cannot use your hands. There is no joystick or game pad. You must use your thoughts.
You turn toward a ball on the floor, and your brain sends a command to pick it up. With another thought, you send the ball crashing into a mirror, breaking the glass and revealing a few numbers scribbled on a wall. You mentally type those numbers into a large keypad by the door. And you are out.
Designed by Neurable, a small start-up founded by Ramses Alcaide, an electrical engineer and neuroscientist, the game offers what you might call a computer mouse for the mind, a way of selecting items in a virtual world with your thoughts.
Incorporating a headset with virtual reality goggles and sensors that can read your brain waves, this prototype is a few years from the market. And it is limited in what it can do. You cannot select an object with your mind unless you first look in its general direction, narrowing the number of items you may be considering.
But it works. I recently played the game, which has the working title Awakening, when Mr. Alcaide and two Neurable employees passed through San Francisco, and a few hundred others tried it this month at the Siggraph computer graphics conference in Los Angeles.
The prototype is among the earliest fruits of a widespread effort to embrace technology that was once science fiction — and in some ways still is. Driven by recent investments from the United States government and by the herd mentality that so often characterizes the tech world, a number of a start-ups and bigger companies like Facebook are working on ways to mentally control machines. They are also looking for smoother ways to use virtual reality technology.
"Neurotechnology has become cool," said Ed Boyden, a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at the M.I.T. Media Lab who advises one of those start-ups.
The article also discusses Elon Musk's company Neuralink.
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(Score: 2, Informative) by acid andy on Thursday August 31 2017, @09:46AM (1 child)
It's been done before. OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator [archive.org] Although admittedly that device responded mainly to nerve impulses (e.g. from facial muscles) over brain activity. It would still be cool to combine this with VR though.
This is tangentially related, but I wonder if they'll ever crack direct input via nerves as well. As I understand it, the problem is, for example, with vision everyone grows their own unique pattern of connections to their retina so in that sense there is no standard interface, which is why attempts to wire cameras to blind people have given them strange representations of visual objects. I suppose the first thing to develop is an extremely high density of connections and after that maybe some kind of software recalibration could be done to try and determine the protocol. Or perhaps some kind of non destructive scanning of the existing pattern of neuronal connections to the retina in the person is possible. The trouble is if they do come up with this in the next century or so, imagine the implications for "Big Data". Who wants their five senses to be part of the Internet of Things? Any takers?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @11:48AM
Yes, exactly. You need to be very careful to not be doing this. I doubt a consumer good could accomplish it, but maybe they have some new trick.