Facebook issued a long statement regarding the Brain to Computer Interface (BCI) and how it could become a way to control and access interfaces with augmented reality. This statement coincides with a research paper of UCSF which was published under the name of “Real-time decoding of question-and-answer speech dialogue using human cortical activity.” in Nature today.
Brain to Computer Interface has been explored for quite some time now to help people with medical conditions like Lou Gehrig’s Disease in communicating with the outside world in a more efficient fashion.
“Today we’re sharing an update on our work to build a non-invasive wearable device that lets people type just by imagining what they want to say,” Andrew Bosworth posted on Twitter. “Our progress shows real potential in how future inputs and interactions with AR glasses could one day look.” Bosworth is Facebook VP for VR/AR.
“We don’t expect this system to solve the problem of input for AR anytime soon. It’s currently bulky, slow, and unreliable,” Facebook State. “But the potential is significant, so we believe it’s worthwhile to keep improving this state-of-the-art technology over time. And while measuring oxygenation may never allow us to decode imagined sentences, being able to recognize even a handful of imagined commands, like ‘home,’ ‘select,’ and ‘delete,’ would provide entirely new ways of interacting with today’s VR systems — and tomorrow’s AR glasses.”
Undoubtedly this will ring some bells around the privacy concerns. Something tapping directly to your brain and getting information from there will leave very little to hide if kept unchecked obviously.
“We can’t anticipate or solve all of the ethical issues associated with this technology on our own,” Mark Chevillet stated in a release. “What we can do is recognize when the technology has advanced beyond what people know is possible, and make sure that information is delivered back to the community. Neuroethical design is one of our program’s key pillars — we want to be transparent about what we’re working on so that people can tell us their concerns about this technology.” Mark is the Director of research at the Reality Labs at Facebook.