How Facebook's telepathic texting supposed to work

Technology news

When the company announced this at its annual F8 conference in mid-April, it was pretty vague about how the feat would be accomplished. Turns out the plan includes building a technology that would, by itself, revolutionize how we study the human brain.

Are the methods crazy? Yes. Do neuroscientists and engineers outside Facebook express extreme doubt this will succeed? Yes. Facebook doesn’t care and is investing millions in research that could produce a consumer gadget.

After I spoke with project members, based at Facebook’s mysterious Building 8 incubator for moonshots, it became clear that the company’s larger goal is to make a handful of long-term bets on technologies that could define the next era of computing.

When your face is stuck inside a VR headset or you’re out walking around wearing a pair of augmented-reality glasses, you can’t exactly reach for a keyboard or mouse, says Mark Chevillet, a physicist and neuroscientist who is Facebook’s technical lead on the as-yet-unnamed project.

The initiative would give Facebook a way to control those systems hands-free. Messaging is just the beginning. Facebook isn’t working on a brain implant—though other Silicon Valley giants are. The answer could ultimately be as simple as a headband.

To pull it off, Facebook has enlisted a small in-house team, supplemented by 60 scientists and engineers from research institutions across the US, all receiving funding from Facebook. Their goal is to update an obscure, largely abandoned technology known as "fast optical scattering," aka "event-related optical signal."

Basically, you shine a light through the head and into the brain, then measure the light reflected back.

It sounds bonkers, but in one way or another, scientists have been using light to peer into the body for nearly a century.When this technique is used on lab animals, their brains are exposed and researchers can directly observe brain cells expanding and contracting as they fire. The challenge for Dr Chevillet’s team is to accomplish the same thing in intact humans, when there’s a layer of skull, skin and hair in the way. It’s a problem that to date has been impossible to surmount.

Read Full Article

Hi, My name is dimple shah and this is the News article Blog