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| Eddie Chang (right), MD, and David Moses, Ph.D., in Chang’s laboratory at UCSF Photo Credit: Noah Berger/ UCSF |
Facebook is developing an Augmented Reality (AR) brain-computer interface device that would help users touch their minds.
At its F8 Developer Conference in 2017, the company announced its Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) program, which defines its goal of creating a non-invasive portable device that allows users to type a machine simply by speaking.
Facebook is supporting a team of researchers from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) who are working to help patients with neurological injuries speak again by detecting brain activity in real-time.
In an article in Nature Communications, the UCSF team "shared all the way to achieve a totally non-invasive BCI as a possible entry solution for anti-reflective glasses," Facebook said in a blog on Tuesday.
The UCSF team was able to decode in real-time a set of words and complete spoken sentences of brain activity, the first in the field of BCI research.
The researchers point out that their algorithm has so far been able to recognize only a small set of words and sentences, but the work in progress aims to translate much larger vocabularies with considerably lower error rates.
"The promise of RA lies in its ability to perfectly connect people with the world around them, and instead of looking at the phone screen or taking out a laptop, we can maintain eye contact and retrieve useful information and context without losing the rhythm, "added Facebook.
According to chief scientist Michael Abrash and the Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) team, "we are on the verge of the next wave of human computing, in which the combined technologies of AR and VR converge and revolutionize interact with the world around us".
"This will be something completely new because an interface with the mouse / GUI has been developed from punch cards, printers, and teleprinting machines," said Abrash.
The BCI Facebook Reality Labs research program aims to develop a silent and non-invasive voice interface that allows users to enter text simply by imagining the words they want to say, a technology that could one day be a powerful contribution for everyone. portable AR day glasses
Finally, researchers hope to achieve a real-time decoding rate of 100 words per minute with a vocabulary of 1,000 words and a word error rate of less than 17%.
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Facebook first announced in 2017 that its research laboratory, Building 8, was working on a computer-brain interface.
The Facebook program follows the bold investigation of the Neuralink startup, led by Elon Musk, who revealed small "threads" of the brain on a durable and home-use chip that can replace the bulky devices currently used as brain-machine interfaces . . .
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