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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."
If this makes it past vaporware, I'll dance a jig.
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
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
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 ?
Profit
The issue is that with the current state of DARPA and US military "research", you can put pretty much anything in front of this line (including as many lines of ??? as you want) and it'll still happen.
Our brains are incredibly good at parallel pattern matching. We can see patterns - real or spurious - in almost anything. But those thousands of parallel pattern matching units have to be funneled through a single consciousness to be useful. If a computer can sort through the synapses, find the ones that are looking to match "man with RPG in the distance", and figure out when they fire, it can perhaps bring something up on the display faster than the person can. Computers, after all, can process a small number of things faster than we can. They just can't process as many complex things in parallel.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
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You have to filter, otherwise the signal/noise ratio leaves us in a worse state than not noticing. This looks like it might help negate an overly-zealous filter.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
> You must be new here.
New anywhere, I'd say. ...or a woman..
Max.
Well, we're talking about binoculars, I'd assume you wouldn't be using them when you aren't trying to find something in the distance.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.