It looks like Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be outdone by Elon Musk’s Neuralink tech and if the title of this article sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, then your not alone. Sci-Fi films and TV series have warned us about this type of tech for a very long time now but that isn’t stopping brain-computer interface research and it could be coming to the Facebook AR glasses.
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Facebook recently provided an update on its brain-computer interface research and it sounds like things are moving forward quite well. A team of researchers at the University of California have managed to decode “a small set of full, spoken words and phrases from brain activity in real-time” and Facebook plans on integrating that technology with its Augemented Reality (AR) glasses. This isn’t coming any time soon, however, as it is roughly a decade away according to the announcement.
The update on the brain-computer interface explains the progress the team has made.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#33f9ff” class=”” size=”22″] While previous decoding work has been done offline, the key contribution in this paper is that the UCSF team was able to decode a small set of full, spoken words and phrases from brain activity in real time — a first in the field of BCI research. The researchers emphasize that their algorithm is so far only capable of recognizing a small set of words and phrases, but ongoing work aims to translate much larger vocabularies with dramatically lower error rates.
The past decade has seen tremendous strides in neuroscience — we know a lot more about how the brain understands and produces speech. At the same time, new AI research has improved our ability to translate speech to text. Taken together, these technologies could one day help people communicate by imagining what they want to say — a possibility that could dramatically improve the lives of people living with paralysis. [/perfectpullquote]
Although the opening of this article mentioned how Sci-Fi shows have warned us about things like this, it is actually for a good cause. This will allow parapelegic or paralyzed people to communicate freely with others and that’s fantastic. If you think brain-reading tech is far-fetched, then think again. An example, Matthew Nagle, who thanks to a brain-computer interface, was able to control a computer cursor with his mind and even able to play Pong back in 2006.
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What do you think about Facebook’s plan for its upcoming AR glasses and brain-reading tech? Let us know in the comment section below.
