Interaxon: Thought Controlled Computing

[Céline]

This February 2010, visitors to the Ontario Pavilion at the Vancouver Winter Olympics will be able to control live light shows on Toronto's
CN Tower, the Parliament buildings in Ottawa and Niagara Falls, all the way from Vancouver – using only their thoughts.




If you can plug it in, you can control it with your brain.





The InteraXon technology is a software and hardware interface that lets you control almost anything using only your mind. It works by converting brainwaves into digital signals that are fed into a computer. Furniture, audio and visual devices, toy cars - all controllable without the touch of a button. Here's a breakdown of the process:

THINK

Your brain generates electrical patterns that resonate outside your head, which accumulate into brainwaves detectable by an Electroencephalograph (EEG). The EEG can't read your thoughts, just your brain's overall pattern of activity, like how relaxed or alert you are. With practice you can learn to manipulate your brainwave pattern, like flexing a muscle you've never used before.

As the neurons in the brain fire, they generate magnetic fields that can be easily read from the head using an Electroencephalograph, or EEG. The InteraXon system analyses these readings and separates the waves by frequency into alpha, beta, gamma, and theta waves, each of which is associated with a particular conscious state.

TRANSLATE

InteraXon's interface works by turning brainwaves into binary (ones and zeros). We're like interpreters fluent in the language of the mind: our system analyses the frequency of your brainwaves and then translates them into a control signal for the computer to understand.

After analyzing and sorting the waves by type, our software compares the amount of energy in each band and generates a control signal that correlates to the strength of a particular brain state. The system we are currently working with is designed to respond to alpha waves, which are associated with relaxation and creativity, and beta waves, associated with attention and visual focus. Participants quickly learn to induce what is known as an alpha state (a brain state with a high percentage of alpha waves). By easily entering or leaving this state they can manipulate the world around them just by relaxing.

ACTIVATE

Just like a button or switch can activate whatever it's connected to, your translated brainwaves can now control anything electric. InteraXon designers and engineers make the experience so seamless, the connected technology seems like an extension of your own body.

These complicated technological underpinnings remain invisible to the end user who comes to experience the system as an extension of his or her own body. The interface can be mastered by participants in five minutes or less and is designed to provide clean, immediate feedback. This allows users to concentrate solely on the output necessary to achieve the desired results – much the same way that you can lift your arm without knowing about the motor cortex, cerebellum and afferent nerve pathways involved in the motion.

http://www.interaxon.ca/

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Ok no one finds this amazingly cool?????

[Greetings]

I keep on remembering a talkshow with Steven Spielberg on the release of "Minority Report" in. 2001 or something. He was saying the technology of the "precogs" will "be here in 10 years or less".

This gives a good example. And i'm sure people are quite interested by this, but with all these strange things happening (Feb 11 31st iranian independence/ wall street) - there's a lot of stuff going on.


5 years down the road will be a completely different world - be it good or bad (i think good but we will have to struggle for it)

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Yes peoples focus seems to be on fear rather then discovery

[haibane]

Awesome, so people will queue for their brainwave pattern samples to be collected ... (^__~ ) A test-run for something that will soon become compulsory twice a year perhaps?