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OCZ Prepares Neural Impulse Actuator for Shipping
An anonymous reader writes "Technology review site Overclock3D has received word that OCZ Technology is putting their neural impulse actuator (NIA) into mass production for shipping next week. The device, aimed at gamers, works by reading biopotentials. 'These include activities of the brain, the autonomous nervous system and muscles — all of which are captured using embrace sensors located on the NIA's headband, amplified and sent to the PC via USB 2.0.' Users of the NIA will be able to control their in-game movements using only the power of mind. The device is priced at around $600USD"
Month early much? Oi.
Insert obvious joke about Blue-Screen of Death here.
What happens if the device misfires an electrical signal, either due to software (buggy code) or hardware (material deficiencies, etc.)?
This will be very helpful in controlling my drug mules. I'm sick and tired of them deciding to skip out on me after they've made it through customs.
Sorry for the team-kill, I sneezed :)
Seriously, however... Sure it's an interesting product, but I highly doubt it's accurate enough to be of much use and it certainly won't be replacing the keyboard and mouse any time soon!
It'll be interesting to watch this technology mature though...
If I didn't have to think in Russian.
The online porn experience would be greatly simplified.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
The article says the device will cost an estimated $300, not $600.
So say I want to play Half-Life 2 with this thing. When I'm setting controls and it asks me to press forward, do I think "forward" and it'll give the game a keystroke? Is this actually supported by any games at all right now?
While many professional gamers spend many hours every day for several years training these reflexes
but that makes even me chuckle.
woot
No No No.... "reaction times can be cut by anything up to 60%" I don't care about reaction times. I care about my wrists. Frag gaming, just let me move my mouse for more than an hour without painful twinges and numbness.
Also, these idiots are missing a revolution here. I believe that something like this device coupled with HUD glasses will be a revolution as large as the mouse and GUI were back in the day.
Right now I am coupled to my computer. It got better when I got a laptop. Now my computer comes with me. Still though, I have to take it out, sit down, and while I'm using my computer I'm stuck staring at a screen and using a keyboard/mouse. The "Mobile" in mobile computing only counts when you're not using your computer.
Imagine if you didn't even have to take out your computer.
Leave your computer in your bookbag or pocket. Put on your display glasses so you can see your "screen" hovering in your view. Use a headband (perhaps hidden in your hat) to control the interface (and perhaps one day type). Use speech recognition to type and control.
No more hands. No more being chained to your computer. This frees us as much as the mouse/gui freed us, and will pave the way to opportunities I can't even imagine....
And these idiots are touting it as a gaming gimmick. Not even one mention of UI possibilities. Sigh.
I want my Shadowrun Comlink. The future is staring at us and people aren't even paying attention.
-Tony
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Just when you thought you'd be safe from the NSA peeping into your brain and having to defend yourself against thought crimes... next up, BushCo introduces legislation requiring all interweb users to be wearing this device.
My friend did his thesis on using (basically) this system to help invalids participate in the world, about 10 years ago. According to him, at first everyone can raise or lower all their brain waves at once, and within a month can raise or lower a specific wave. At first for it to be accurate, you need to have the system read muscle movement for facial tics, but gradually you can phase out this input as the patient becomes more adept at controlling his mental state. The hardest part of writing his thesis was getting time with the equipment.
Forget about games, this being mass-produced is a great step towards turning the handicapped into the handicapable .
Also, look for the New Agers gobbling this stuff up for their meditation ceremonies.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
I'm not disabled myself
but the first thing that comes to mind with one of these things
is if it could be used to control motorized missing limbs?
wikipedia mentions neural interfaces that connect directly to the brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroprosthetics
if you could carry a laptop around with one of these little boxes
it might be a bit more convenient (and perhaps safer) that having direct brain implants
with enough time and miniaturization you might even be able to get feedback
not to mention the 6 million dollar coolness factor (plus tax)
...it's real, and it's a very old idea. Atari created a very similar device 25 years ago. It was crude by today's standards (you very nearly had to move your eyebrows for it to register movement) but it did work. Atari had working prototypes at a CES in the early 1980s--people could play pong and breakout with the "mindlink". It was a crude form of the very same technology used here, though it was much less sensitive and required a bit of muscle movement for it to pick up neural impulses. The technology was developed for myoelectric prosthetic limbs and has matured greatly since those days.
Atari's MindLink controller was never released to production though...testers often experienced tension headaches after using the device for extended sessions and it was not very precise. Beyond pong and breakout and other simple games it was not very effective because users had trouble coping with more than simple linear control. Also, furhter refinement of the product was abandoned as this was around the time of the Tramiel takeover (and Tramiel was known not to ever be enthusiastic about the potential of home video game consoles vs. low cost home computers) and the big console industry shakeout made for a lot of vapourware from all industry players.
Certainly with increased processing power and better sensor technology in the past 25 years there could be much more potential in such a device, especially for those who have physical disabilities that prevent them from effectively using keyboards and mice. This isn't April fools or even a new idea, and it employs passive sensors (they do not transmit neural impulses--only detect the ones you generate) so a "blue screen of death" won't really kill you, and if you get a good fragging it won't fry your brain (the feedback is only visual--what is on the screen).
Will this allow me to cyber fist my cyber boyfriends anus?
Bioptentials is not a word. There are plenty of words they could have used, there was no need to make one up.
If you don't see a Linux driver for anything, don't complain - code. It isn't hard to learn, or to implement. Then, once you're finished you have a working device and you can be the hero of a small subset of the OSS community.
...or, have you forgotten that the entire reason OSS is supposed to be much better than closed source is that everyone/anyone can (and should) improve it?
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
I'm torn as to whether this would improve gaming ability or decrease gaming ability.
For instance it is unlikely that the sensor will be able to map the complex ideas of the mind, instead it would reduce it to basic commands, so they can be mapped to the computer.
However, this would mean you would have to cognitively think of something, to product the desired result.
Now if I'm trying to think of something to produce the result, how much does this conflict with me strategizing?
At present the commands are mapped to physical movements, which eventually become subconscious and can be used quite well.
However given you need to consciously think about something to train this thing in the first place, doesn't that imply that you will always need to consciously think about it?
I don't think this would be better than our current technology, until we can intemperate what the mind wants, as opposed to adapting the controller for the mind.
I'd like it for fast typing, given it could keep up with my mind, and given I could train it to read my internal dialog.
(Disclaimer: I am not an authority on anything this subject or any subject like this. In true Slashdot form I didn't even read the article, just got opinionated about it based on the summary.)
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Looks like they may be beating http://www.emotiv.com/ 's "EPOC Neuroheadset" to market by several months. The claim for the EPOC was that it would be available for the holidays at the end of 2008. Interesting that they are also planning to sell for the same $300 price as this OCZ one.
Probably Patented... And if not, does your mentioning it here count as prior art? Really good look at the future of computing, especially if this device works by reading thoughts. Hell, you could morse code characters with your thoughts initially, if need be.
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
I've read a couple of articles about it now, and they've both said $300 but the summary says $600... what gives?
If it has API it will rock as a secondary input system to mouse. You will be able to scroll through text/code just by looking, switch windows, copy paste - it has an enormous potential. Again, if it can be trained to work with 99.9% precision like a mouse.
They had something very similar back in the day for the Sega Genesis I do believe. It was marketed as 'mind controlled' or what have you but in all actually got it's input from the muscle movements around your eyes which in turn the head band you would be wearing would interpret as some sort of signal. If I remember correctly it performed about as well as an NES Power Glove.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Can this be used to control the bionic hand in my lab to jack me off?
This would be the perfect input device for PSI Menus! Instead of Linear Thinking Menus (where you always think downward, but for a different distance to select for each menu item), PSI Menus let you think in different directions to select different items.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
When you're playing Battlefield 1942 and you see a tank shell coming for your face? I find it very hard to believe this kind of technology will be able to interpret the "OH SHIT" reflex accurately...
It's unclear from the description what this actually does. I don't think they claim that it reads electrical signals from the brain directly. There are lots of other electrical signals that it might be reading.
Of course, whatever it reads, it may still be useful.
about halxf of the revel in our gay The chaanel to sign
Looks like all they did was rip-off the Electropsychometer.
Use the technology for self-improvement, and it's a farce.... make games for the device and then it's just great!
After reading the summary and then the article, I find myself sitting here baffled that this might even work. Hell, if I can even get this to move my mouse around a screen accurately I'll jump up and down with amazement. Maybe I'm just way behind on how much has been done in this field, but I would have imagined something likes this would be at least a decade away. After the reading the Slashdot summary I assumed that someone had decided to move April fool's to March 1st.
Am I the only one?
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Brain interfaced targetting support? better UVA flight manuvers? Attack helicopters needing only one person because the pilot can now control the gun with his mind? If the military thought using xbox 360 controls was innovative... wait until we present these things to the brass!
I wonder if it could pick up the OhFuckGetmeOutOfHere signal in the brain when things go really bad and bind it to generic backout/escape/undo actions. Handy for ejector seats in military aircraft too.
I work with ATC user interfaces and I wonder if something like this could be used to sense cognitive overload when the controllers job gets busy.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/input/js0
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Will it and its software be encumbered in 50 patents, full of brainwave-based DRM sending logs upstream, and WindowsNT-only?
I hope to see people buying these and writing Linux hacks to get it working on Linux as soon as it goes on sale... maybe we can have a kernel driver by the 2.6.30 release?
I then hope to see people writing FOSS APIs that can be used in non-gaming applications (word processor, anyone? Lots of embedded possibilities... imagine using this as a UI for graphics applications... whether for paint or CAD/CAM apps)
Tech Public Policy stuff
Your a month early...April's fool is NEXT month!
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
I do a lot of molecular structure and I'd friggin' love to rig one of these as a replacement for the medieval SGI dial box. By the way, when are you gamers going to (1) demand gaming in stereo video and (2) demand a decent trackball? Don't you know that if a large consumer fragment wanted these things, games would be more fun and also science would benefit immeasurably? I mean, this couldn't be possibly be a fun controller, could it?
Just callin' it like I see it.
How can the product be an actuator, and consist of sensors? Aren't those like ... opposites? Am I just being old-fashioned in thinking of the device as a sensor, used by the computer, to detect brain activity? Is a joystick also an actuator?
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
From TFA... "the OCZ neural impulse actuator doesn't use electrode cream, which is a good thing because the last thing gamers would want to do is lube up before playing their favorite game."
They clearly haven't tested it with this game yet...I can't wait for that product to hit the market.
This tech isn't new. It's just now coming down to where it isn't clunky and stupid. It will be further refined. I don't want to wear stupid headgear either, but if it was just a pair of sunglasses and a small band you could hide inside any hat... Hooray!
I can imagine where the whole package would one day fit inside standard glasses.
-T
Reminds me of one time in high school, a friend played my copy of F1 Race and set an unholy fast time on one of the tracks, beating all my records by a long shot. For about three evenings I tried to beat his record, and eventually came close, but I couldn't beat it. These simple old racing games played more like modern dance games - accurate timing of your actions was key, and I had been intently trying to get my timing as sharp as possible. At this point I knew the track like the back of my hand. One time I just kind of zoned out and wasn't paying attention - and I finally beat his record...by a good margin.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
... WOW.
... WOW.
It is real and the technology exists. I have had past PERSONAL experience with computer control via neural feedback.
--side story to explain: I have ADD and aspergers. When I was about 8 (I think) I saw for some time a particular specialist and one of the activities I did was to be hooked up (with electrodes on my head) to a computer and navigate a 2D map with a little dot.
Not quite the level of control that you'd need however I can tell you with practice it gets easier.
This is amazing stuff. I'm so getting one.
'Tis a shame some won't be able to play.
Seriously. Whenever you overuse a part of the human body in a way it was not designed,
you will have to face the consequences.
Most everyone knows about RSI from keyboards and mice, and long term eye damage from CRT's.
For voice technology, we found that using your voice all day
in a manner constrained to be understood by a speech-recognition engine
will make your throat sore and leave you unable to speak within just a few days.
I wonder what new sort of affliction this user interface will bring us?
Probably some sort of inflammation of the brain, like encephalitis, alzheimer's and vascular demetia.
Great! Something new to look forward to... if I could just remember it.
Stephen Hawking can play Quake!
When World of Warcraft addicts are too weak and their physical mobility has been compromised they can just lay in bed and use their mind to handle those multi-day raids.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
after reading the headline, i looked at the icon, and i was like, slashdot has an icon for telekinesis? Oh, right, input devices.
lol.
There are three things this has to be able to do reasonably well for me to buy it.
1: Basic control of Windows (be able to move the cursor, double-click to launch programs, etc.
2: Be able to use this to enhance internet browsing. I should be able to use such commands as back, forward, refresh, follow link, etc, in addition to controlling the cursor.
3: Be able to use this to enhance gaming. I looked at some more articles and apparently this is possible. People were playing UT2k4 and UT3 using the mouse only for aiming, with this device controlling movement, jumping, etc.
Also, if it could do those three and additionally have Linux support, I would buy it in a heartbeat, buy an extra one for no reason, pay $500 for each, only use OCZ products for all my future builds, etc.
Nah, they sell it in packs of two, hence the $600 figure. It comes with the regular version and special censored version for when your mother-in-law is around.
Heh, I WAS in serious pain. How'd I fix it?
:P
I stopped playing WoW. I drastically cut back my computer time(more time for other hobbies!). I used good old hot and cold presses. I threw my mouse out and got a logitech thumb ball. This is never going to go away. I have to manage it for the rest of my life... Or until I get around to that surgery.
Now I just get the occasional flare up. I'm fine. As it turns out, real life has great resolution and awesome minigames. Grinding my job is kind of annoying though.
Just one step closer to Virtual Sex.
Geeks.....REJOICE!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
When U realize $600 has the buying power of $150 8 years ago, it's a pretty low price. If it really works, it could be quite valuable. Have a feeling it has a few gyros & accelerometers in addition to the "neural" sensors.
captial 'N', capital 'I', captial 'A'. It's new, it's from OCZ, and it's here... right now.
Okay I have to admit this is beginning to fall into the "I will believe it when I see it" category. Yes yes I know it's POSSIBLE, and definitely DOABLE, but it's never been done and honestly there'd be a HUGE ... uh yea... H U G E ! run on these things if they work as advertised. That said I hit every link I could find to get more info.
/. links to says OCZ's going to be shipping the product "next week"... the article is dated March 1 '08, that means ... March 7 shipping to stores. I can't find reference to this product in ANY RETAILER MAJOR OR MINOR. There is no preorder option because as far as I can tell according to the retailers this product does not exist.
So far I'm coming up dry. The article
I am concerned about a hoax here.
Gamestop: Nada. Nothing OCZ NIA or OCZ Neural.
Amazon: Nothing useful. Some irrelevant books when searching for OCZ Nia. Less relevant results when refining the search.
OCZ Technologies: Web site makes exactly one mention http://www.ocztechnology.com/aboutocz/press/2008/262 scroll down.
-- Device not listed under products.
Fry's Electronics: Zip.
Looks to me like they aren't shipping anything to anyone retail. I'm begging someone to prove me wrong here, because it doesn't look like we'll be getting this technology in our hands inside the next couple weeks... or even the next few months. Signed: I want to be wrong. File this under "if_it_sounds_too_good_to_be_true..."
The article isn't clear about just what you'd be able to do with this thing in terms of input. I'm interested in FPS games mostly. Will you be able to control aim or walk or what? If I still had to use the mouse to aim, but could "press" fire with my brain, that 60% increase in reaction time would be helpful for those critical sniper v. sniper head-shots in Teamfortress 2. Or say I could handle all keyboard input--walking, weapon switching, crouch/jump--but still had to aim with my mouse. I'd be cool with that too. Something about that seems "cleaner" than fopping around with an array of keys. Just saying goodbye to mouse-wheel weapon switching would be awesome. If I could see someone's back and almost subconsciously think "knife," then before even realizing it I had performed the weapon switch, that would be kick ass.
Or can you indeed control the aim with the same precision as a mouse? Even if it took months of training, I think I'd be up for that. Maybe you map all your controls to the device as well as maintaining your current mouse/kb setup, and slowly over time move more of your interaction off to the NIA. Anyone know just how sophisticated the input is? Even using it for simple web-browsing sounds scary cool now that I think about it. So much of the smaller, day to day point-and-clicking of a mouse is simple enough this thing ought to handle it. Or even dictation. Thinking sentences across the screen letter by letter. Has a sort of ouija board sexiness to it. If it's half as cool as I'm thinking it is then I want one.
Uhm... just a thought, but... tablet pc, usb wireless input devices, a few bucks at lowes for the bendy-snake piping stuff to mount the tablet on, maybe an old halogen floor lamp, or something similar for a base... and it sounds like you could have just what you're looking for. If you require more of a "desktop" input set, perhaps you should invest in a sheet of plywood, while you're at it.
Might not be pretty (at least, not as I have described it), but using MDF instead of plywood might save money *and* let you sculpt something with a boxknife and a piece of sandpaper to suit your tastes as a worksurface. A little spraypaint can give you some color other than the ugly gray of the MDF stock. Using a wireless trackball instead of a wireless mouse, some glue or zip-ties, and maybe some more of that bendy-snake metal tubing could allow you to make a gravity-defying worksurface, as well.
All in all, not counting the time to acquire the materials... prolly an hour's work, tops. Of course, that's not counting spraypaint drying time, either.
YMMV, this is just a simple off-the-cuff response.
I hereby release this ridiculously simple idea to the public domain, and look forward to purchasing one as a prefab kit in Wal-Mart next month, for the low-low everyday price of $99.82, sans the high-tech 'tronics, with a Hello Kitty or Transformers branded logo.
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...excuse my humanitarian attitude, but a technology so great should be applied for those among us that are disabled...
I'm sure this technology will be used to help the "differently abled" among us to live more fulfilling lives, but I'm not interested in that end of things. I'm not disabled. I would assume that a goodly portion of the "typical Slashdot reader" population feels much the same way. There are "humanitarian" groups in this world, they exist solely to help people who are "differently abled", and they're typically fairly good at their jobs. I'm absolutely certain they will pick this up and run with it. As a matter of fact, I'm sure they already have.
Forgive my lack of political correctness, or my perceived greed and selfishness, but I would rather think of ways to extend humanity's reach, regardless of whether someone in a wheelchair (or otherwise disabled) will get any benefit from it. I'm not, by any stretch, saying that this technology shouldn't be used for adaptive difficulties, or prosthesis technology, or in any other way that will help those who are "mobility challenged". What I am saying is that we should not limit ourselves by thinking of this as simply a method for disabled persons to experience gaming.
Imagine putting on this headband, a set of video goggles, and a set of headphones with attached mic... then plugging all of them into a laptop in a backpack. Show up to the LAN party, grab a Bawls or Mountain Dew, plop yourself on the couch, connect to the local wireless, and start fragging your friends. Alternatively, show up to the office, grab a cup of coffee, plop yourself on the couch, connect to the local wireless, and open up that spreadsheet.
I'm not sure of the limitations of the system, despite reading the article (and googling for more coverage, as well). It appears to use facial musculature for some of its input (The demonstrator guy says something along the lines of "I set my jaw for run forward, clench my jaw for jump, and look left and right for strafing"). Depending on how many inputs can be tracked at once (and it looks like an awful lot, considering the guy was playing UT with just a finger and thumb on the mouse, looked like he was simply aiming with the mouse and using the headband for movement and firing. I never saw him touch the mouse buttons), one of the immediate benefits I can think of is changing workspaces at-a-glance. In Ubuntu, for instance, you can "rotate the cube" to get a new workspace. I would think it would be trivial to set "looking right and left" to "rotating the cube right and left", to literally switch desktops at will. Another application might be to set "clench jaw" to "save document with timestamp", to automate versioning (yeah, you could do it with a timer, but then you end up with weird cutoff lines in your code). Wiggle your eyebrows to change the internet radio station. The possibilities are not endless, but could conceivably become "arbitrarily large".
Combine the headband with a multi-touch surface and some speech recognition, and you have an awesome creativity-enabling environment.
Or, think on a smaller and more trivial scale. Use the headband as a remote control for everything in your house. I don't know how much power the headband requires, but if my Logitech G7 Wireless mouse can play WoW or Orange Box for 6+ hours at a stretch on a single matchbox-size battery, this thing out to work for an hour or two on something small enough to be placed inside the headband. The RF signal tech in my mouse works for a good 20-30 feet, in a room containing a half-dozen workstations and a pair of servers, so I can't imagine it would be all that difficult to make this work as a wireless device with a similar range. Remove the wires, and the application possibilities of this device expand to the absolutely silly, without leaving the realm of the plausible... and more importantly, the realm of the possible.
In short, don't simply look at this and say "o
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Here are some videos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKd_AJUUT7Q&feature=related .
(direct neural interface for those who dont know)- The idea of hooking a device up to your brain then to your usb port is a little funny to me, the concept is good but they still havent mastered the science behingd this device.
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It's a neural impulse sensor, not actuator. An actuator would tense your muscles or something.
Specifically, does it take linear or abstract input? What I mean by linear is "move mouse left by up-left until this thought stops." What I mean by abstract is "mouse to 387*765" no matter how quickly one can move the mouse in a linear fashion, it just isn't the same *sort* of thought as "move mouse to 'blah.'"
Its important to recognize that brain waves aren't thoughts - they're the result of thoughts. We can sense waves, but we can't sense thoughts. That being said, I'm curious what might happen if we add more sensors. Will we need to use different parts of our brain to control different aspects of the device? Right now the sensors are all located near the neo-cortex, why? Could they be useful in the back of the skull, near the cerabellum?
There are a lot of questions about how the device works that, when answered, will give us a better idea of what we're talking about.
Ahh, you appear to be reading the Hobbit. Turn the page for an unobtrusive text message beamed directly into your optic nerve.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
From what i've seen and understood it seems that the OCZ NIA supports boolean states only which map well to keystrokes. This also explains why they use the mouse to move - linear input makes a poor pointing device.
:-P )
Even with that aside, This technology is damn exciting. But before I run out to the nearest MindMart and pick one up I'd like to know a couple things like
* how many distinct inputs it can accept
* how many simultaneous inputs it can accept
* exactly -how- proccessor intensive is it.
* and does it come with a toolkit - I want to play with my brainwaves! (Who doesn't
Even if it only has a couple distinct inputs, but has a toolkit I'd go for it. Anyone able to answer these questions?
While the technology may not be perfect for every gaming application yet i think that it will be the way things go. For those of us that don't have excellent hand/eye coordination I can see this becoming a viable alternative.
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