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Northrop Grumman To Develop Brain-Wave Binoculars
An anonymous reader writes "An AP wire reports that DARPA has granted a $6.7 million contract to Northrop Grumman to develop 'brainwave binoculars'. The binoculars will be built into a helmet, which will include EEG electrodes that will monitor the wearer's brain activity for patterns consistent with object identification/recognition. From what I can gather, the idea is that when you look at a far-off or partially obscured object without noticing it, your subconscious probably did notice it and tried, unsuccessfully, to identify it. The EEG in these binoculars would pick up on that kind of subconscious activity and draw the wearer's attention to the object in question. The goal is that these binoculars would be able to pick up on any object anywhere in the wearer's field of view, where a person can only pick up on things that he focuses both his eyes and his attention on. This delves into some very interesting territory: it would be an electronic device that uses human eyes to collect data, and even uses a human brain to partially process the data. Since it also passes its results back to the human providing the data and initial processing, it essentially adds a second processing loop in parallel to the wearer's visual system."
Northrop Grumman gets to make all the cool stuff. It just isn't fair...
If this makes it past vaporware, I'll dance a jig.
... those x-ray glasses they used to sell in the backs of comic books.
What do you want to bet that the only thing these binoculars register is 'tits'.
Have gnu, will travel.
Does this remind anyone of the Necromunger Scope beings from Chronicles of Riddick?
Servicemen reprimanded for zooming in on young women's breasts. One of the servicemen was quoted as saying, "It's the damn sub-conscious link! I can't do anything about it!" Defense department reevaluating binoculars.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Think about using this in interrogations.
Interrogator: "Do you recognize these photos of bomb making materials?"
Suspect: "No, no I don't."
Interrogator: "Liar! Our brain wave scanner says you do! Off to the waterboard with you!"
can your brain be made to run Linux?
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
The important question: Can it see through tin-foil hats?
From reading the short article, it looks like a method to take images the brain filters out as unimportant, and bring them up to the conscious level.
Problem: if you do this, wouldn't this clutter your view with unimportant images, or alternatively cause cognitive confusion? A person with this device attached literally couldn't trust their eyes anymore.
Sounds like Mescaline.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Is there not a risk of weird feedback, and the wearer's head eventually exploding like that bloke in "Scanners"?
I for one welcome our helmet wearing overlords.
I bet master chief's got one of those.
The article may make this sound a bit too original, but it is nevertheless extremely cool. While it's certainly a fascinating combination of thought-recognition, object-recognition and Augmented Reality, it is not the first implementation of any of those things - but it IS really exciting to suppose that thought recognition could be used to help filter noise out of a detail-rich image field and improve AI object-recognition. How well the AR will work, well I guess we'll see - the military has had pretty good AR in their HUDs for a long time. But we're finally starting to see some cool AR in consumer tech too. In fact, there was just an article about an iPhone hard hack this morning implementing it over on digg. Definitely worth checking out.
A-Bomb
Technology in the Muslim-West war will be the stuff of nightmares.
Looking through these and watching Natalie Portman covered in hot grits, running Linux on a Beowulf cluster? What would you look at and what would it keep reminding you that you noticed but weren't focusing on?
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Would be great if I could install Ad Block onto this thing...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865/
-516
1.Can this help me if I am drunk, and am looking to ascertain if a lady will be a suitable partner.
2.I am cross eyed! Will it effect its performance ?
I remember reading about the research behind that; that the "subconscious" detected things quicker than the conscious human. But if I could find it again, I'd like to see the details of the testing.
My guess is that the time between subconsciously and consciously recognizing something is used for verifications. So you get quicker results in the case where the image is, in fact, what you are asked to recognise, but you'd get false positives in the other cases.
I mean, recognizing threats is pretty important, evolution-wise. Since this device just takes existing data from the brain and feeds it back in, it's hard to believe it would be of any help, or we would have evolved the same thing.
Iomega has applied for a DARPA grant to develop a digital brain interface that will allow the subject to store in his noggin as much as 80 (160, with a doubler) gigabytes of sensitive data.
Guy wearing binoculars notices some object
...
Binoculars sense this and draw attention to object by putting some kind of HUD symbol on screen
Guy wearing binoculars notices HUD display object
Binoculars sense this and draw attention to object by putting some kind of HUD symbol on screen
Guy wearing binoculars notices HUD display object
Binoculars sense this and draw attention to object by putting some kind of HUD symbol on screen
Guy wearing binoculars notices HUD display object
Binoculars sense this and draw attention to object by putting some kind of HUD symbol on screen
Binoculars and/or Guy's brain explodes
???
Profit
So what if you're looking at an enemy tank and some bird 100m behind it starts flying around. Do the binoculars automatically refocus on the bird even though you don't want them to ?
http://www.es.northropgrumman.com/solutions/hornet/index.html
You're the guy sitting on top of the HumVee. Your job...
Northrop Grumman is always developing things like this in prototype, their entire business model is based on trying to sell the US Military things they don't need.
They can't monitor your 'subconscious' at all. Do some google searching for neural interface devices if you want details.
Here's a brief rundown on this tech:
You have to train the software to recognize patterns that happen when you perform a physical action. After it learns that pattern, it is easy for you to learn how to generate that pattern without the movement, or even the intent of movement.
Essientially, it is the use of Bio-feedback to train yourself how to trigger the software. It is all active on the human's part, not some sort of 'mind-reading' device.
garbage to hang on a GI that will distract him, or her, visually, at critical moments and which will run out of battery power at the worst possible times as well.
Remember Heinlein's comment about combat gear - it has to be easy enough for a grunt to use so that someone equipped with something simpler, like, say a rock, who then comes up from behind the soldier using the hardware and bashes his brains in while he's trying to read a vernier.
The Borg must be so proud....
Ive been monitores with this.
Its annoying they know exactly what you are thinking, and where your eyesight goes.
They also know the ammounts of energy your brain is using (i.e. for making a large concatenation of ideas in the learning process).
its used in acreditation process for working for the state or some major clans.
ugly.
On looking at any scene the human brain must catagorise thousands and thousands of schemas and frameworks while trying to determine objects of interest in that scene. Clearly most of the things the brain identifies are not of value and the schema is not raised to high-level consciousness.
When you step out of your front door every morning, the brain would identify squirrels, grass, hose on the lawn, a car with four tires, a motorcycle, the sun, clouds, milkman (ad nauseum)... If the wearer of this helmet were to be interested only in the newspaper on the step, what would stop the helmet from identifying every other object in view?
Basically, there's so much information in the world, how can a helmet determine that the terrorist in the bush is more important than the cat in the bush? They're both potentially threatening.
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
It would be interesting to know if this would not just train the brain to warn you in those cases too. You are creating what could be considered a correcting feedback loop.
The question is, where do you make your brain draw the line and will it not teach the brain to just turn off all filters...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D05E0DE143CF93AA35751C1A9679C8B63
The only question is whether they're using it. They probably are:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/158464_brain29.html
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
...learn to think in Russian.
That's right Waldo, you can run but you can't hide!
Sweet! This may help me in soliciting investment capital for my tin-foil hat business.
I'm not fat, just big boned...
... this particular kind, extract the spam and forces you to eat it, specially after your built-in, 1 million years (?) into development, antispam filter discarded it.
If anything, will be useful to understand more how and why our perception process discard things. But maybe even walking wearing that things could prove being very hard.
Finally, X-ray glasses that actually work.
As a kid, I sent in my money for the x-ray glasses on the back of the comic in my bubble gum. What a rip-off. Maybe I'll finally get a pair that work.
Best regards.
BRAINWAVE COUNT (0)
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
The primate brain evolved in a situation where noticing hidden things was kind of important. Didn't see that shape in the grass? Oops, it was a skulking lion, you're dead, return genome to sender. We're the product of millions of years of life-or-death vision tests, and as a consequence, we're pretty good at it.
This device is based on the idea that some part of your brain might notice a hidden thing, but doesn't bother to tell the rest of you so you can react. This is evolutionary suicide. I'd have a hard time coming up with a trait that would be naturally selected out of the gene pool faster.
If this device worked, anyone who could use it would have gone extinct long ago.
Same concept of Snakes "Snake Eye Patch" Maybe it will work the same and tell me where all the Playboys are in a room.
This should make it much easier to spot imperial walkers on the north ridge.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
This may be off topic. I think that an auto-zoom telescope would be cool â" when you look at something far of, your scope focuses until the object it clear.
My optometrist does something similar â" he asks you to focus at an object while he changes the lenses. He does this automatically by looking at how much the muscles in my eyes strain. If you could do that automatically with a little pattern recognition magic you will hit pay dirt!
Clint Eastwood's FIREFOX hasn't played on TV in a while has it?
This is news?
I was thinking what a great way to raise money it is to keep secrets and then keep getting refunded for projects that already exist. lol.
Didn't Al Gore go on an inventing binge and invented the internet, the brain wave binocular and the remote control on one very productive evening?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This calls to mind an exchange between Dirk Gently and Richard MacDuff in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency":
I know that's just fiction, but there's a grain of truth to it. You see a lot more than you choose to pay attention to in the moment. Thank you, Mr. Adams, may you rest in peace.
One can only wonder whether this is yet more Pentagon disinformation to scare dim-witted Third World generals, like the anti-matter bomb.
...are we scared yet?
Have you ever pointed a video camera at a tv it was outputting to and seen theinfinite tunnel... What happens when you look at a monitor that outputs the results of the binoculars while you wear them?
Damn, I wish DARPA would fund my neurofeedback turntables... ;)
(Multi-spectral response here....)
To help old codger politicians up their gains when combined with Viagra.
Imagine: The Love Guru Meets Linthicum Meets Issac Hayes' The Chef Meets Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing Meets The Teletubbies Meets....
Well, this might have some "knock-on" effects if it can be tied to porn and the x-box. QOS will take on a hole.. umm, WHOLE new MEANING when tele-sex can be used to keep the POP-ul-LASH-ON under complete control.
Talk about visual stimulation.
But, even if this thing pans out to its claims for it, this might end up causing sensory overload for the military personnel.
ONE WAY TO DEFEAT THIS: fire multitudes of multi-spectral weapons at the wearers. They won't TRUST the damned thing, and even if it discriminates real from seduction targets, eventually the device and the wearer will become worn out. To ensure the device doesn't "learn" to discriminate correctly, make sure the seduction/distraction launchers fire as few duplicates as possible...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
This could single-handedly (bun, umm, pun intended) reserect the Porn vs Beta arguMENts and breath mints in one fellow swoop.
Now, all those "angle of the dangle" jokes could be reserected, tool. Now, tie this device in with an ocular implant (7 of Mine/NINE comes to mind), with a Vinculum, and all those back-alley adult film studios and we're talking about serous... umm seerious sin-sory overload.
NorGrum might have better luck positing this thing at the porn industry. But, since it records images going on in the brain, strapping one of these onto prisoners might help prevent jail riots, monitor thoughts of those about to be executed, or just ferret out perverted pilots who are in their own single-handed miles-high clubs or troopers in their own Six-inch-trench clubs.
(No, you're NOT free to hook up one of those things to my brain or brains...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
sumers...
(rant on)
Then the BONE-US COULD be OHN-US. These things could help musicians, artist, poets, the audiences of mimes, and so on. Police could use them, sure, but so could hikers, nature observers, and scores of other types of people.
Why does that f&cking device have to be announced solely as a military gadget? Sexy seduction of tax payers' dollars is probably why. I'm sure they DO product non-combat gear, but dammit, I'm tired of my tax dollars going to producing shit for those who want or prepare to kill when they can produce expensive, but affordable stuff for the masses. Oh, maybe they'll sub-license under some brand non-related to their name....
(rant off)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
to same-sex males the ...
"BONE-OC-U-LARS", for the low-low price of $69.99.
Butt, WAIT: Act NOW and get a FREE cortical stimp-lulator (yes, STIMP is a word boyz-n-gurlz) for those who like nice ass-trough-turf beneath their noses...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I can't wait for augmented information processing. This reminds me of projects like Peep that take advantage of our natural ability to parallelize sound processing in our mind by representing status information that way because vision is more restricted in focus.
Sounds like it would pierce an SEP field quite neatly!
Just what I've always wanted, a Psychosis Helmet!
so if the brain can process it, and the helmet can process it and pass it on to the brain what happens when a dumb person wears it? infinite loop? will there be a timeout variable?
... Plane flies you!
Seriously, where are all the Firefox jokes? You know, the one where Clint Eastwood had to think in *hacckk-ptooey* Russian in order to fly that goddamn canard-ridden piece of Soviet propaganda? Where's Elia Kazan when you need him?
That's it - I'm leaving. I don't care, call the weekend guy. *door slams*
This just in, ninjas are now obsolete.
This is merely an attempt to signal a human consciously when the unconscious notices something but it gets filtered out. Maybe -- if they are VERY clever -- they might even be able to highlight the general region in the view where the object is.
This is not artificial intelligence, or mind reading, or anything of the sort. It would merely be a slight enhancement of native human ability... and I bet it would take a pretty large piece of hardware today to do it.
I'm a visual systems neuroscientist that has done work in primates and seen data from electrodes implanted in humans.
What's valid - the brain receives a lot more visual information than we consciously perceive. The brain's activity can be compared to a bayesian estimator. It compares the current stimulus to a set of priors and determines what it will attend to, what it will note but not attend to, and what it will dismiss. It does so along two main pathways, one goes through the brainstem (superior colliculus) and mediates primal reflexive responses, and the other is to the visual cortex. It is conceivable that you could extract the stimuli that were close misses and zoom in to get a better look at them.
The problems - we absolutely do NOT understand how the above computations are performed in dynamic natural environments. When we do understand it, it will almost certainly be through observations of networks viewed at single neuron resolutions. This is nothing like EEG, which even at its most modern has mediocre resolution. There ARE EEG systems that can get sufficient resolution to determine general retinotopic map location...if the subject is static...and the activity patterns are analyzed offline. But if you're doing that you might as well just beam the images to a room full of people to analyze stills.
Conclusion: It's not practical for field use...if you want to do it in the lab, fine, but then it's simpler to just pay multiple people to watch the images and watch their saccade patterns.
head implodes!?
"If you load a mudfoot down with a lot of gadgets he has to watch somebody a lot more simply equipped - say with a stone axe - will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a Vernier".
- Robert Heinlein
This rig could easily distract the wearer by continuously dragging his eyes into distant "ratholes" where some conceivably suspicious activity might be going on. But the very amplification of the binoculars would limit the field of vision to a very small area. Meanwhile, someone might very well sneak up and bash his head in with a stone axe - or, perhaps more likely, simply shoot him from the middle distance.
Another fundamental weakness is that the rig could only detect suspicious movements the wearer could actually see. So, if his head happened to be turned slightly away from an attacker, there would be no chance of seeing him.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Does it go on forever?
This might be useful for something like search and rescue in the ocean, where you might only have a fraction of a second glimpse of someone bobbing in the water.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Er, what? You mean set some form of decoy weapon up? why not a real weapon with real bullets that kill stuff real dead?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I'm sure I've seen some movie about that...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
42.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for