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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.
... 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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?