Brain control has always been an interest of mine and when I saw stuff like Puzzlebox Orbit I thought we are getting better and without a big cost as NeuroSky’s MindWave is an amazing piece of technology at an incredible price.
Now really the Orbit has limited control given they are limited to using concentration levels as measured by the MindWave, but the guys at the University of Minnesota have really taken this to the next level as they have a quadcopter flying through an obstacle course and doing other stunts controlled only by brain control.
I had thought about doing grad studies in this area in the 90’s but really the technology to make all this stuff happen is happening now so all I can say is WOW!!
) and one of the problems was ‘focus’ in that humans don’t really focus on stuff for very long, think of human focus as being a singled thread CPU, it might have an important task to do like fly a fighter jet, but it also has a boat load of other tasks to do and even worse some of those other things are pretty much totally random like ‘what am I doing for dinner tonight’ sort of things so when hooking up the brain to tasks like flying a plane these other brain thoughts could pretty much crash the plane, so one of the things that makes this application interesting is they are ignoring brain switching by not using focused thought per say, but settable peripheral control by the brain, ie you can make a fist and then leave it as a fist while thinking about something else. The ultimate idea of brain control is to have the device read your thoughts (I want to fly to the Seychelles Islands) and then have it handle the details and make it so (which means it also needs to ignore some thoughts which don’t fit the desired objective), so for example the idea here is to fly through a hoop, big task, so its broken down into littler tasks, go up, go down, go left, go right sorts of commands, but again that brain focus thing is deadly, so they do those commands, not so much by thought, but by action instead (which does involve a kind of thought). So we still have a long ways to go, but we are a heck of a lot further ahead than we were 25 years ago and the fact that I can hookup a NeuroSky Mindware Mobile to a gadgeteer device and make my mind do something is freaking amazing. I would have happily killed for some of the devices we have now, back then, and so I look forward to the continued acceleration of this technology in the future.