computer-brain interface
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Teenager plays Space Invaders with only his brain
While having a robotic assistant play video games for you might sound novel, it's certainly not as thrilling as interacting with the 1s and 0s yourself. A team of researchers, engineers, and students at Washington University in St. Louis have crafted a brain-computer interface system that allowed a 14-year old gamer suffering from epilepsy to cruise through the first two levels of Space Invaders using only his imagination. Rather than picking up an Xbox 360 and perusing through the Xbox Live Arcade, the crew went back to their roots and programmed an Atari 2600 to interface with the brain-sensing apparatus. The headgear boasted a grid of sensors that monitored "electrocorticographic activity" from the brain's surface to detect signals based on thought processes that were going on. By calibrating his thoughts with video game triggers, the teenager was able to learn the ropes "almost instantaneously," and had no qualms demolishing the competition while twiddling his thumbs. The group plans to use this successful experiment to further understand the mysterious signals of the mind and give physically disabled individuals a chance to show of their mental sharpness, but we're hoping to see this thing bundled in with the sure-to-be-delayed PlayStation 8 that should hit shelves sometime before 2040 2050.[Via MedGadget]
Computer-brain interface device will speed up video footage review
No matter how many spy cams and unmanned surveillance drones government and law enforcement officials can pack into public spaces, their utility has traditionally been limited by the finite amount of footage human monitors can review in a given time frame. New DARPA-sponsored research out of Columbia University, however, may soon allow folks tasked with keeping an eye on video feeds to perform their jobs up to ten times faster -- by leveraging the rapid image processing abilities of cortical vision. Since people are able to recognize suspicious activity much more quickly than they can consciously identify what's wrong, professor Paul Sajda and his team developed a computer-brain interface device -- similar to ones we've seen control an on-screen cursor and bionic limb -- that monitors an operator's neural output while he/she is watching streaming footage, and tags specific images for later perusal. Once the technology is perfected in the coming months (it still emits too many false positives, apparently), it could allow for more thinly-staffed monitoring departments, though we suspect it will probably just convince officials to deploy more and more cameras.
