Some of you may be in the know in regards to the announced launch of a “mind reading” headset by a company called NeuroSky. The headset, cleverly called the Mindset, will allow players to use only their thoughts, some of us call them brainwaves, to control the action on screen. What many of you might not know is that the new technology has peaked the interest of good ol’ Uncle Sam.
That’s right, the United States Army has a keen interest in the way the headset functions and wants something similar built into troop helmets. Only they want theirs to be able to let their troops communicate with one another quickly without the use of speech instead of controlling an on screen avatar. The idea is for troops to be able to think a message to a teammate in the form of a text message, voice mail, or, if at all possible, straight into their head.
An Army grant, of an as yet undisclosed amount, has been awarded to three institutions; the University of Maryland, the Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of California, Irvine. The first step in the research is to come up with a way to compose a message using on thought processes while the second phase will actually focus on sending that message to a person or object, for instance, another soldier or a radio or text device.
The technology, known as synthetic telepathy is nothing new and has certainly been something scientists have worked on over the years. But with the success of recent companies in the field, namely NeuroSky and Japan’s Keio University, we may be closer to “mental cellphones” than we think.
Mike D’Zmura from the University of California, Irvine and the lead scientist on the research project certainly seems to be leaning towards the less militant applications of the technology should the project be successful, stating, “It will take a lot of research, and a lot of time, but there are also a lot of commercial applications, not just military applications”.
Certainly the military uses would be limited but the commercial applications could be limitless. Mental emails, nonverbal communication with your co-workers… Mental Spam from advertisers. Hey, I’m just thinking out loud here. And you might be as well if this project pans out.
On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it gave us a heads up on what our women folk were thinking… Now *that’s* a practical application!
Gritskrieg – End of Line
