Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Controlling things via thought ? Don't laugh, it's already there !

For many people, to be able to control things only using thought is more associated with fantasy than reality. However, the consumer electronics improvements combined with brain related research are currently making the dream come true.

During the last years, some prototypes were performing but were a bit too intrusive, because they necessitated a surgery to implant a chip in the user's brain.
This video about the Braingate system is a good illustration of this great but intrusive technology, in a medical context : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJPbpHoPWo

But big improvements have been done, and an article from The Economist is actually showing how this can be possible, basically connecting a human brain and a computer thanks to electrodes sit on the scalp.
These outstanding improvements are not geographically so far, because one of the most promising recent prototype comes from a team of the University of Zaragoza, which announced a commercialization during 2014 !

There is another constraint to assess in this domain, which is the headset design, quite rudimentary if we take a look on the first trials in this domain, presenting a large set of unelegant wires.
This is changing too : Emotiv sells special headsets that enable - to some extent - to interact with movies or games.
And it doesn't stop here : Neurosky proposes a large set of potential applications, for instance trying to break the secrets of sport performance.
On the whole, we can assess that the domains of application seem to be literally limitless...

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