Facebook bought assets and technologies of CTRL-labs, a young neurointerface development studio. Details of the deal are not disclosed, but Andrew Bosworth, head of the virtual and augmented reality department, spoke about the prospects of using the acquisition. According to him, soon there will be a "bracelet" that can be worn on the hand to read electrical impulses passing from the spinal cord to the nerves in the extremities.
If such signals can be recognized with high accuracy, there is a chance to decipher and interpret them as commands for a computer. And then you will need to scale the technology to capture any other signals in the human nervous system. This is already the area of work of Facebook Reality Labs, which is engaged in the creation of ready-made products based on advanced developments, such as human-computer neurointerfaces.
Earlier this year, scientists from the University of California at San Francisco, with the support of Facebook, showed the technology of converting brain signals into letters and individual words. It was presented as a breakthrough in this field, but it quickly became clear that the available developments were not enough. For example, the advantage of the same CTRL-labs is that its readers are non-invasive, so it is enough to attach them to the user's body rather than implant them into it.
It is interesting that the term "mind reading" in this case is almost literally perceived, because in its optimal form the technology should react not to the user's actions, but to the intentions to take actions. And then a person just wants to press a button to open a new window in the application, as the system recognizes and executes this order. Without mouse clicks, without muscle movements, without sounding commands and even without their formulation, at an intuitive level