As We May Think

From the great Designing for Humans, comes this 60 Minutes story on advancements in machines that can read human minds. In essence, the new machines can be trained to recognize certain patterns and recognize them when we think. For example, think of a hammer, and the computer will know. Of course, you have to sit still in a giant MRI machine to do it. In time, though, this will be commoditized.

 


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It seems reasonable to me to expect mainstream computing usage of:

• Touch interfaces within next 12 months (iPhone meet desktop)


• Active displays covering surfaces of devices in 4 years (iPod looks that change with 1 click)


• Gaze-tracking interfaces in the next 5 years ("Ah, you meant to type in this window")


• Face recognition/verification in 6 years (Good morning Sally)


• 3D video displays in 7 years (Check out my new Sony 3D TV)


• Proper synthesis of haptics in the next 10 years (Turn down the paper thickness on this book)


• Brain tracking in 20 years (Computers are again too slow to handle the speed at which we can interact)

Comments

[halbtuerke]

Wow, that's kinda scary, especially when you think about what the guy in Germany said and what was said about the "secret" light beam…

[Wenzel]

Everything except the brain tracking sounds good.

[Keith Lang]

I think in 20 years we may be culturally prepared for the interfaces. There is a parallel to the technology of spy satellite, telephone monitoring, internet filtering.

Although, of course, initial brain interfaces will be pretty clunky. And worse case, you can wear your tinfoil hat (which actually might work?)

[Keith Lang]

A friend (thanks Nick!) pointed me to this Scientific American Story on shrinking MRI machines, the 'MRI Mouse'

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-incredible-shrinking-scanner&page=3