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."

Comments

Here's a link to NGES's press release

[fintler]

http://www.es.northropgrumman.com/solutions/hornet/index.html

Re:Here's a link to NGES's press release

[fintler]

Actually that's the product page. The following is the actual press release:

http://www.es.northropgrumman.com/news/2008/06/144249_Northrop_Grumman-Led_Te.html

Re:Oh Wow, Man... the Images

[georgewilliamherbert]

There's an old saying, along the lines of "To see something, you must look at it, and then you must see it."

A lot of what you look at you could match / comprehend properly but don't. In many cases, parts of the brain used for the pattern recognition do fire, but the process doesn't complete (due to overload, fatigue, etc).

Having something mechanical flag those for you will help with the final seeing part.

Of course, it has to be tuned right. A lot of the brain's pattern match stuff fires on things which aren't a real pattern. Every edge is autodetected early in the processing, etc. I don't know how wide the actual useful range for this is, where fatigue or overload will prevent the last couple of steps but enough happened that one can meaningfully statistically say "you should look at that again" to the person in the loop...

YORE

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the guy sitting on top of the HumVee. Your job...

Already exists:

[GameboyRMH]

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