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Cortical Cybernetic Implants
Floody writes "Wired is running a story with amazing cyberpunk "wow factor." Implanted visual cortex stimulation, complete with "percutaneous pedestal"; a metal jack installed directly into the skull. Where can I get a night vision enhancement module for this with HUD and distance finder?" We've posted a couple of previous stories about Dobelle and his work on bionic eyes, but this one has more details: one frame per second, $100,000. Wow.
Where can I get a night vision enhancement module for this with HUD and distance finder?
.. uhh .. nevermind ;-)
Forget that, where can I get an x-ray enhancement? Nothing like seeing through
Did anyone else think Borg when they saw the first picture on that site?
Especially so after seeing the second one. The one with the wire coming out of the back of the skull.
The article states that the device was set at 1 frame per second initially. The first part of page 4 states then they would "...gradually work the frame speed up...".
The first version of this device installed in Jerry 20 years ago could acheive at least 4 FPS, so this version should be faster.
Not to complain too much, but check the date at the top of the article (thats what 10-99 is in case you are wondering).
Actually, there was a lengthy article about him in this month's issue. I just read it this past weekend.
- Dan I.
the vision-gadget should be enchanced so that it detects when you are going to see something you do not like. For example, all chicks should be photoshopped, if you know what i mean, all cars should be ferraris (well, for my neighbour, let's choose Lada), and all drinks should be Pepsi. :)
I just got the article in this month's print edition.
- Dan I.
Yes, very cool technology. The description however drove me nuts.
"My arms are under his, trying to steady the weight. His head snaps toward mine, and I take it on the chin with the force of a solid right cross."
Do we care about this? Can't he just say "occasionally, he has convulsions", rather than ranting on for multiple paragraphs about this mysterious device like its a sci-fi book.
Yeah, sounds like oodles of fun. Shiver...
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
in the same iridescent blue as Tally Isham's Zeiss Ikons?
j ec ts/garza/cp_optic.htm/ ~tonya/cyberpunk/projec ts/garza/cp_info6.htms .com/gibson/gibson.html
For those of you who don't get the above joke see the link below.
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~tonya/cyberpunk/pro
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu
http://www.antonraubenweis
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
yeah actually it says 10.9, which is Wired issue 9, volume 10 I believe - making it current (besides which it says september 2002 right next to it).
Will be required to send a signal to headquarters everytime copyrighted movies are seen.
Not to complain too much, but check the date on Dobelle's website:
"All eight (8) patients had an uncomplicated hospital course after implantation in April, 2002. There have been no infections."
when I can sit down at a desk with maybe just a keyboard, and plug in the sound screen and everything directly into my head.
:-)
:-)
Sound would be amazing if they could get the entire range (including that which is naturally lost after childhood) to work. Imagine hearing music absolutely perfectly clear. Wouldn't that be awesome.
And screen would be even better. Considering I have contacts as is, so the screen isn't 100% clear, just good enough.
Imagine if they could have the screen show up with clarity beyond that of 20/20 or even 20/10 . Movies where everything is perfectly clear.
If scientists were to actually work on ways to "jack" ourselves in. There are so many things we could do with it. Even just the sheer speed increase of data entry if we just had to think about it.
The possiblities are endless...
~ kjrose
There are these people called "blind people". Maybe they could find a use for it.
Now the question that would be interesting...
What happens with copyright laws when people have these (types of) implants in them?
If you can record, verbatim, (i.e. through the use of some static ram, etc) what you see as a "perfect" digital copy, then would that be copyright infringment? Is the implant going to be considered the same as other (external) hardware?
Its a sticky issue, imho- Will the copyright holder "rights" force us to unlearn what we have learned because they have a patent or copyright on the idea? What happens when the electronic thought ends up being the same as normal "human" thought because the devices are a part of us?
I imagine that "our" lawmakers havn't even considered considering such a thing. The lack of foresight isn't suprising, but it is disheartening.
-R
I will NOT be volunteering for beta-testing of. No, no and no. I'll wait for other people to pioneer this field. I like my brain, and until they get the "regenerate and repair of brain damage" thing down pat I'll wait. For people who need this, I'm happy it's advancing, but I want to give the tech a bit to mature to the point it's a viable elective option.
Er, wouldn't it be easier to use wireless communications and transdermal power rather than poking holes in you're #1 infection prevention mechanism (your skin)?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I would be interested in knowing how beneficial this would be across different types of blindness. Patient Alpha grew up with sight (two words - safety goggles) and one can presume he knew how the world was supposed to 'look' prior to decoding the phosphenes.
Would a person born blind be able to use this technology? If so, better or worse than a patient who had sight? On the one hand, a person born blind may not have any preconcieved notions about how the world is supposed to look and may be better at interpreting the phosphenes as the 'real world'. On the other hand, I wonder if the phosphenes would be interpretable at all to a visual cortex that has never learned how to see.
Well, you can - but unless a nearby star goes supernova, you're not gonna see much. It's pretty dark in the X-ray spectrum around here.
And if a nearby star does go supernova, you're still not gonna see much. It'll be bright in the X-ray (and the visible, and the gamma, and the infrared), but being burnt to a crisp is rather an impediment to seeing anything. (In other words, it'll still be pretty dark :)
It sure costs a lot... they'll probably get advertisers to co-pay it so they can run their advertisements over your sight every 10 min :D
You know that's where it's going.
Why is a mouse that spins?
Sci-fi like ShadowRun tries to predict the future. Sometimes, they get it partially right. Though, frankly, I don't see any basis in reality for this "essence" nonsense: I've known plenty of cyborgs myself. Even my dad's one, technically (artificial heart valve). They're just people with artificial parts, not soulless monsters who have lost their humanity. (Though I've also seen plenty of 100% natural human beings would would count as "soulless monsters"...)
If they can do eyes, which I would have (apprently wrongly) assumed would have been the most complicated, when will they be able to wire up people to take electronic input from the other four senses?
And what about the other direction? Taking signals for muscle movements directly out of the brain?
I heard at one point that there was speculation about injecting cell-sized machines into the blood stream that would find their way to the brain and interface themselves with the host's neurons, without any surgery. Obviously, there's a long way to go before anything like this, but it might actually be possible 50 years from now.
The "Matrix Experience" would be a lot more attractive if it didn't involve someone opening your skull up and poking around inside your brain.
I just read this article, its from the September, 2002 issue. That in itself is kinda frustrating, as I'm reading the article online only a few days after reading it in my subscription. Oh well, subscription is cheap enough anyhow. Besides, the non-article content isn't always published on the web.
Where can I get a night vision enhancement module for this with HUD and distance finder?
How about you just be thankful for having working eyes at all? It's something too many of us take for granted
Personally, I'm waiting for elves, orks, street mages, and a dragon to be elected as President before I start comparing the world to Shadowrun.
Now, Neuromancer, on the other hand...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Once artifical parts give you superhuman power, then you might start to see corruption of the "soul". Hollowman is a good movie about this subject. =)
I wonder how that interface goes through the membrane (can't remember the name) that surrounds the brain - as well as how it heals. This membrane (from what I understand) has nerve endings to feel "pain" (the brain cannot feel pain), and also acts to protect the brain from infection as well. It lies between the brain and the inner surface of the skull, so I wonder if the socket pierces this, or if only the electrode wires do (which would be better, but not much).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Chew: "I designed your eyes."
Roy: "Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes."
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Though I agree with you fully, it wouldn't have done FASA any good to have players running characters that had all kinds of body ware AND the ability to cast magick, would it? Borg bits stripping out essence was there as a pretty obvious way to enforce game balance.... which, as we all know, is something Real Life doesn't have. :P
Me, I just want the flying cars. And ninjas. Definitely Ninjas.
At first, he is shown a lower res image (lower than 32x32) - he then is upgraded to 32x32 and asked if he can see anything. He can see blobs of color and such - but then suddenly, he says things "resolve", and he can see things more clearly. He asked if they upped the res again, and they responded "No", that his brain was re-learning the "see" the new image.
Now, I don't know what kind of image processing software and such they were using (for all I know it may be some simple image mosaic tiling software like is used to mask peoples faces on TV), but I wonder how "sharp" or well defined the image he saw was? Further I wonder if you did look at one of those mosaic images on a TV in the right conditions (ie, through an HMD with no outside light penetrating like the reporter wore), if the res would "pop up", and you could see who the real person was?
Also, this effect seems real similar to what was noted a long time ago back when VR was just getting started (early 90's), in that when using a low-res HMD (320x200 or less pixels), you had to "learn" to "look past" the pixels, and the image would slowly become clearer.
So, in the area of VR HMD research, I am wondering if resolution really matters at all, or if there is a minimum resolution you can give the eyes, and let the brain fill in the rest? If this is really the case, then wide FOV HMDs, using lower-res displays and some training (so the brain can learn to "see" in one of these things) could possibily bring VR back in the limelight.
Anybody have any thoughts or comments on this?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I'm not blind, but one of my clients that I do a lot of work for is. And believe me, even though he was born blind, and can cope, there are still thousands of things that we take for granted that he simply cannot do, and will never be able to do without some form of vision. If something like this became available for the born-blind (unlikely, since the visual cortex never develops fully for the born-blind) he would jump at the chance, and he has told me so.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
And its much better re-write, Cyberpunk 2020.
With the improved combat system (the first was taken from statistical analysis of real shooting statistics (system was called Friday Night Fire Fight) but the second made it easier to play!) and the ultra improved net-hacking section (so good it made me peak) forget magic.
And yes you had to avoid the dreaded cyber-psychosis if you got too much metal.
But to get back OT- YES. YES YES YES.
THis is exactly where this technology is going. And you know thousands who would literally give an eye to have night vision/scanning/HUD/etc. So while it seems private practice and academia are pushing the envelope for the disabled, the military will have it first (some cyber-soldiers) and pioneer the field of augmenting those with two functional eyes.
Whats super exciting to me is that it seems our technological future has been sufficiently influenced by our science fiction. Wether that be our science is better or our fiction was just closer to reality, I don know. (the Gernsback Continuum by our man Gibson is a neat-o little story related to the future that never was).
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
We have a long way to go before we have to worry about the ethical implications of augmented abilities. What such stories stress too rarely is that none of these add-ons work nearly as well as the factory-standard equipment that most of us were born with. Never mind customization--we're still trying to get halfway-decent replacement parts.
yeah, but think of the great show you would get while popping popcorn in the microwave!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It would be much more Darwinian if he had lost his nads though!
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Anyone worried about computer virus being written for and transfered directly to the human brain? Especially so if a certain gargantuan computer software company, with its tentacles in everything and its views on security, wrests the software side of the interface away from the rest of the market.
Tin foil hat time:
Will they come with mandatory GPS transmitters like cell phones, too? (Got to make sure they aren't bein used for terrorism, now...)
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
This is without a doubt of the more impressive HCI developments I have seen in the last decade, and steady progress is being made.
I note that progress is also beging made in the reverse process (generating an image by monitoring neurons firing in the visual cortex). Check out this paper:-
Visual Decoding
Which details images generated directly from a cats brain.
One point to keep in mind is that sadly this technology can only help people whom had sight at birth, but lost it after early childhood. If the patient has been blind from birth, the parts of their brain that would be normally used for vision have not developed and have been "reassigned" to other sensory tasks. (Which is why blind people tend on average to have more actue senses of hearing, smell, touch and taste - there are more neurons available to process them!) If this device was deployed on such a person, it is doubful that they could make much sense of what they could "see".
The thing about the sorts of x-ray photos we've all seen before, like the type a doctor would use, is that to get such a photo requires more than just a device that can "see" x-rays on film. It also requires a device that *emits* them ot be seen, since, as the other poster pointed out, there isn't a whole lot of x-ray "light" down here on Earth occuring naturally. Thankfully.
Just like trying to use normal vision on somewhere like, say, Pluto, where you would need a flashlight to see anything, here on Earth you would need an x-ray "flashlight" to see anything with your x-ray vision. And I doubt you'd be allowed to just walk around dosing random strangers with it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
How about having extra eyes that you can use while the main pair is resting from computer work? Just put on your cool glasses and plug into your other eyes.
How about having 10 eyes at the same time that show you a panoramic view of the space around you, can our brains handle that?
How about wireless eyes? All of a sudden a frase: "I've got an eye on you" has a whole new meaning to it!
How about using eyes with much more surface to receive more light for better magniffication?
How about being able to actually *see* what other people see by sharing the same eye among many people?
What about new types of entertainment where you are plugged into millions of eyes doing crazy stuff or into gigantic eyes... Computer games with Virtual Reality? You don't need a better monitor, your brain is your monitor.
Going to Las Vegas and using your super vision during a game of Black Jack? Why not - if your frame rate is high enough and you have a video buffer built in, just record how the cards are shuffled and play back at much lower speeds to see the positions of cards in the deck.
The possibilities are enormous.
You can't handle the truth.
Isn't this in their fiction section?
peace,
core
"There is no Death. Only a change of worlds."
After one day of calibration and one day of the patient being plugged in so his brain learns to interpret the signals, patient alpha got into a car and drove it around the parking lot. Sure it started at 1 FPS when they turned him on, but it is clearly operating at a much higher level than that, and all with only one eye calibrated.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I remember reading about this kind of technology years ago, back in college. I didn't think it would have advanced this far, this soon.
:)
There's a history of macular degeneration in my family, and my vision is currently around 20/800. I always joked about getting my eyes replaced when they got too bad, assuming my vision would hold out until my mid-50s and the technology got that far. It seems as though I might not have been joking after all
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Which is why I'm in favor of these powers being gained in this method: when anyone can just buy an upgrade, is the power it grants still "super"human, or does it just bring the naturally born up to the new human norm, just like modern artificial eyes are intended to bring the blind up to the modern human norm?
This article is bogus. He claims to have perception across his entire visual field. How can this be if the wires are attached to one hemisphere?
Because much like everyone else, his "visual field" is defined by his perception.
Secondly, how can he possibly see if the connection point is at the somatosensory pathway. He could interact with the world but not see it. Cognitive psychology people.
I must not grok this question. He "sees" by using his brain(mind) to process signals coming in from his optical nerve. The fact these nerve signals are generated by an external electrical stimulus to the nerve cells instead of coming directly from the eyes should make little difference.
Since he definitely has a brain(mind) and perception, much like all humans, I don't see where there's any trouble defining what he does as "seeing".
From m-w.com:
see v.
1 a : to perceive by the eye b : to perceive or detect as if by sight
Why would people who work with window coverings need cortical implants?
In Soviet Russia, Beowulf cluster imagines you!
I would imagine it would be with the right software. It falls in the same vein as a proven method for restoring old grainy video/film. Most of a given scene appears in hundreds of frames in a row, and the camera and it's flaws change position over the course of those frames - therefore you can average out the errors by comparing to neighboring frames and truly "restore" the film to a better-than-original quality.
Similary, but without the nagging worry of having killed subtle temporal changes in the object, I would imagine you could composite many cheap cameras into one large image, averaging all overlaps (almost everything should be overlapped many times) and get a very high res picture.
11*43+456^2
The short answer unfortunately is no, a person blind from birth will not be able to benefit from this. I've done a lot of research in this area because I'm amblyopic, which means that I have two physically functional eyes but only one is actually fully useful. They don't point at quite the same angle (though you'd have to look pretty closely to tell), so my brain gave up on combining them into a stereoscopic image and basically let the left one go hang.
It wasn't spotted until I was five, which means I missed the window to fully develop that side of my visual cortex; it's useful for peripheral vision, but I can't distinguish shapes and lines well enough to read with it. Had it been spotted early enough, just putting a patch over the good eye while the laggard developed could have let me see all these 3D images everyone's always on about... grrr!
Still, I'm lucky to have sight and I know it. I can't provide a reference, but IIRC there's a study in which cataracts were removed from the eyes of children who had been born blind. They were still not able to see. You have only a narrow window of time in which to develop parts of your brain. If you lost your sight after about five or six years old then you could probably benefit from this, but if you were born blind you're going to have to substitute other senses. For example, it would still be possible to translate a camera signal into a grid of pressors distributed over some area of skin.
Parents, get your toddler's eyes and ears checked!!!
The MPAA has been alerted. They'll be at your door in 20 minutes, to make sure you are thrown in jail for attempting to circumvent the copyright on their media using your optical implants.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
On the other hand, think of the new market this opens for porn... How many people here would be paying big bucks to have porn fed straight to their visual cortex? :-)
For those who are looking to get ahead, and have it first, without actually having it...
Save BIG BUCKS and get your percutaneous pedestals here. $7.15 ea on sale.
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I'd say just directly stimulate the pleasure center of the brain. Just what we need, current addicts (cf. The Ringworld Engineers by Niven).
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