Obsessed by the improvements of StarTrek and the fourth millennium, while feeling restricted by the limits of today's technology or that boring second law of thermodynamics? Just let your imagination flow - you needn't be Scotty to beam your thoughts in here!
By socratesOne
#6323
I just read an article on slashdot.org about a new device that allows people who do not have the use of their limbs to manipulate a curson on a computer screen.

Although this is obviously a breakthrough, it struck me as incredibly stupid at the same time. A mouse cursor? Maybe I don't know much about how the machine works, but here's a guess:

The electrodes pick up signals from the brain and form a "map" of activity during different states. Since thinking of different things activates different parts of the brain, people can be "trained" to move a mouse by thinking of the direction, mapping the brain activity, then replicating and tweaking as needed.

What a waste of time! A mouse cursor is perfect for use with a hand, since all you need is hand-eye coordination, but the level of difficulty of moving a mouse with your brain seams to me to be extremely inneficient.

How about this instead:

Map different COLORS and SHAPES. Different ICONS. Different WORDS. Any kind of concept that a normal human being would be able to think of quickly. In short, the REAL interface for the human brain is based on MEMES. Use these MEMES in order to control a MENU-BASED interface to access heiarchial databases.

The best exercise for this new kind of training would be the old game SIMON. You map the four colors, then play the game by thinking of each color in the correct sequence.

Simple.
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By Steve
#6349
I've hear of a system that picks up your eye movements by the use of several cameras and "translates" them into cursor motion. Is that what the article was about? :-?
By jacobpatrick
#6458
hey i saw something like that on tommorows world a few years ago.
somebody was flying a virtual spacecraft through hoops with a kind of wire hat on. so to all intents and purposes just moved a cursor round a screen.
but back to the topic you could design some kind of software that
flashes a simple picture at you, and you imagen it in your mind to calibrate the machine.
and then every time you thought of that picture it would command your computer to do something.
you could even memorise the whole keyboard.
i like your idea its very forward thinking.
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