Alex Kelleher’s Blog

As we try and link ourselves ever closer to technology, the industry of human-computer interfacing is developing rapidly.   I thought I’d check out the state-of-the art brain-PC interfaces, on the basis that if any of them seem good enough, they may change the way we use the internet forever.

1. OCZ Technology – Neural Impulse Actuator (£73)

Pitched as a gaming device, this headband combines a electromyograph (which detects the electrical potential generated by muscle cells), an electroencephalogram (which records electrical activity across the scalp), and electrooculograph (which detects electrical activity associated with eye activity).  Phew.  That’s the pitch anyway, although I think it may be simpler – it essentially detects electrical activity at 3-4 spots across the forehead, and uses software to try and discriminate between the different sources of that electrical activity: your forehead muscles, your eyes, or indeed your brain.

Various reports including this one from OC3D suggest that after a LOT of training, the headband can allow you to shoot enemies in games by slightly raising an eyebrow, or clenching your teeth.  Response times (promised as at the speed of thought) haven’t been shown to be much faster than mouse, even after quite some training.

Verdict: Unproven, probably too simplistic, but an interesting start

2. Emotiv Systems – ($299)

Emotiv have been developing their headset for a couple of years now, and it’s finally being released on New Year’s Eve.  Again, their target is console games, and Emotiv use both scalp electrical activity, and sensing of facial expressions to deliver gaming control.  Their 2008 launch was delayed because “The public demo didn’t go as planned; the device simply didn’t work in front of the media who attended the press conference”.  Hm.

As it hasn’t been launched, it seems that few independent review have been done, so the jury is still out.  However, just on the basis that it detects facial expressions, it probably has greater potential than OCZ’s

Verdict: Unproven, but facial expression recognition could be interesting

3. Neurosky Headset – ($199)

Neurosky appear to have built the biggest ecosystem around their headset – games, integration with music visualization, bluetooth cellphone integration.  However, their headset only has 1 (yes, 1) sensor, which supposedly shows your “emotional state and how you react to the world”.   This really is the most remote from believable “brain control”.

Verdict: Interesting (and smart commercially), but ultimately just a toy

Conclusion
I started looking at this area thinking I’d find a bunch of companies trying to commercialise “thought control”.  I only found three key players, and none of them represent what I can see as being a realistic attempt at getting mass-market mind control of computers.

Part of the problem is that it’s hopelessly simplistic to try and read the brain by measuring electrical activity across the scalp.    Of course, it can result in some simple communication or control of a cursor on the screen – which is a life-saver in the caseof severe disability or paralysis, where it’s enabled a patient to communicate.  However, the ability to do complex tasks just isn’t possible yet (or ever?) without invasive brain surgery – or a far greater number of more sensitive and calibrated sensors across the scalp.

However, there is hope in sight.  DARPA, for instance, has $4m in 09/10 for “Silent Talk” – a project that aims to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.”  And DARPA generally does interesting things with its research budgets – cars that can autonomously navigate complex environments being probably the highest profile example.

I’m watching this space – the day we can control computers using a mix of keyboard, mouse AND thought (I don’t believe that thought will, for a long while, replace manual control) is that day that the internet becomes truly fast and immersive.  I can’t wait.

UPDATE: The crew at Neurosky were switched on enough to catch this post, and send me a whitepaper with some stats in it.  Seems their single electrode compares favorably with a Biopac, a well-used medical wet-electrode EEG system.  I don’t have time to analyse the data, nor can I verify it – but if it’s true, then good job Neurosky (I’m actually more impressed with the fact they caught this post).  I’m still unsure about how useful the technology is today, though…

So I’ve got my results from 23andme – having sent off my sample some weeks ago.  (Thankfully, nothing too shocking in there!)

So, here’s a taster of what you get:

1. Clinical Reports:  The screenshot table below is a snapshot of my risk for various conditions, such as:

• Type 1/2 Diabetes
• Certain forms of cancer
• Crohn’s disease, etc. 

They are the data that clinically 23andme are sure enough of to actually lay them out this formally.  I’ve blanked the particular conditions, but you get the gist.  Also included in this section is information on:

• Traits (such as the ability to taste certain bitter flavours, lactose intolerance)
• Carrier status of certain conditions such as Bloom’s syndrome and Canavan disease
• Drug response to such drugs as Plavix (a blockbuster heart drug)

2. Research Reports – this is analysis that “has not yet gained enough scientific consensus to be included” in the Risks section as above.  It includes things such as:

• Blood pressure
• Dependencies and addictions
• Asthma
• Headaches

3. Ancestry- this shows you a map of your maternal and paternal ancestry, as below – along with (as in all other sections of the site) a healthy dose of background and eductional material

4.  Surveys – the site has a lot of surveys, mainly health/psychological, and the results of those are both interesting to see, and obviously are fuelling 23andme’s knowledge of how genes influence all kinds of health conditions.

5. Sharing – a fascinating part of the site, and one I haven’t yet had time to dig into.   You can select to share your genome with anyone else on the site, at a basic or full level – which enables a bunch of functionality. 

The somewhat obvious extention of this is to work out what the combination of your genetic makeup and a potential partner’s will put your potential children at risk of, with the Inheritance Calculator

Now that adds something to the mate-selection process, huh. 

Actually of all the features and content on the site (and there’s a lot of it), the two elements that raise most people’s eyebrows when I tell them about the service are the disease risks, and the inheritance calculator.   As odd as it seems, I think both represent something really pretty important: the ability to help guard against future risk. 

If I know I’m at a slightly higher risk of some disease because of my particular genetics, AND I know something that I can do about it (eat more broccoli or whatever), why wouldn’t I do that?  Or prepare my kids for it?

I spend my waking hours looking at ways to work out how people behave online and use that information, and to me the analysis of genetic profile is a (long) extension of this – it’s part of the mix of technologies that will enable us to understand US better.

Overall I’m highly impressed with the site – there’s a ton of information there, and obviously by submitting surveys and detailed further information the site will improve.  Over time, they’ll add the ability to analyze and risk-profile more health conditions. 

On a lighter note (but the same topic area!), I’m about to try out facionic.com – results when I get them…

It’s pretty easy to get caught up in being a wired-social-media-twitter-myfacespace-er and forget that actually, most people aren’t that wired.  By which I mean, most people on this 3rd rock from the sun aren’t participating in the heady-Web 2.0 life, and even those we might assume are, are not.  I meet a lot of people who would normally be included in the statistic of “internet users” who, unsurprisingly, are still largely untouched by the latest developments.  Some basic info-graphics (if you can call them that) to illustrate:

So, 5bn people aren’t internet users, versus 1.7bn who are (numbers courtesy of World Internet Stats).  A significant majority of the world’s current population who wouldn’t know a tweet from a poke, let alone who are actively using the internet for any purpose whatsoever.

Next, let’s assume that really wired internet users are members of one of a couple of key sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.  Sure, we could add MySpace, Orkut and so on into the mix, but it’s fairly obvious that the crossover between the different sites is going to be heavy – i.e. most Twitter users will have a facebook account, listen to spotify, whatever whatever.  Another high-tech infographic for your enlightenment:

(The twitter number I’ve derived from various sources, the other figures are from the sites’ own published stats)

Finally, here are a couple of other indicative statistics to keep in mind:

• The median number of tweets per twitter user is 1.  The vast majority of twitter users have bouts of occasional activity, and either give up/stop or take long periods off.  Only a few could probably be classified as very active – maybe less than 1 million?
• Even in the UK 10 million people still don’t have an internet connection.  That means 1/6th of the country who couldn’t even access it if they felt they wanted to.  And of the rest, my wager would be another 30-40million are very light users.

Obviously I’m not saying any of this to try and claim the “internet” is dead or broken or flawed.  The fact facebook has 300m accounts is hugely impressive, and a feat not achieved by any business before that quickly.   In fact, I’m saying the opposite: I’m underlining the huge potential still wrapped up in its growth, despite few people in our worlds talking about that growth, and despite the temptation to assume that everyone is equally tech savvy.

I’m fully aware that those with businesses exposed to BRIC countries know all this – and are building their businesses based on this potential growth.  But I’m also confronted daily with a significant section of the web-culture in the UK/US (including me) who can take a fully-wired society for granted.

Back in 1995 when I started my first company (a web agency) I thought then that maybe I was too late…!  Fact is, we’re still all very early to the game.

At university I did a thesis on how people react to movies (part of which went into a chapter I co-wrote with Julian Friedman for his book How to Make Money Scriptwriting).  Turns out, if we empathise with a character on screen, we mimic what they’re doing with small (undetectable) muscle movements – if they’re running, our legs twitch, etc.

What’s even more fascinating is how we SEE the movie.  When we blink, we lose up to 10% of our viewing time.  So it’s really important that we time those blinks to moments when we won’t miss anything too important happening on the screen.  And that means that in an average movie (or YouTube clip), most of us will blink at the same time.

Synchronized blinking, in short.

A recent study discovered that it’s not always when expected (i.e. a scene break), but at points where something has completed, or the main character is off the screen for a moment.  So the result of a natural moment of low interest, when our brain calculates it can give the eyes a break.

Part of that seems obvious to me (our eyes would dry out if we waited for scene endings), but the fact that almost everyone anticipates the same best place to blink is pretty interesting. 

Watching where people blink could be a pretty strong indicator of interest not just in movies, but in video ads (if we blink when they show the brand, opportunity lost), in top-level sports (especially fast-moving sports like table tennis) in warfare (when do fighter pilots blink?), and so on.

Blinking useful.