Breakthrough toy can read your mind, move objects
By Vito Pilieci, Ottawa CitizenJanuary 7, 2009
Source: Breakthrough toy can read your mind, move objects
OTTAWA — New technology that gives people the ability to move objects with their minds will soon be available at North American toy stores — and unlike those goofy X-ray specs from the 1960s, it will work.
Mattel Inc. has created a game that can read a child's mind and use thoughts to manoeuvre a small foam ball through a table-top obstacle course.
Called the Mind Flex, the game uses technology that reads the electrical impulses — called bio-feedback — that happen within a brain while a person is thinking.
A device that looks like a pair of headphones sits on the child's head and tracks brain activity. Within the obstacle course are small fans that are activated when a child thinks. The more brain activity a child produces, the faster the fans blow.
The game's goal is to have the child "think" the little foam ball through the obstacle course.
The toy, to be officially revealed this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, will be in stores later this year and will be targeted at children ages eight and older. It will retail for $80 US. Canadian pricing has not been released.
While the technology may sound like it came straight from Star Trek, researchers have long been working on ways to use brain activity to direct machines.
"It all goes back to neurofeedback that has been around for 50 years, where you can record activity coming from the human brain through the scalp," said Melvyn Goodale, Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario. "It has the outside look of a science-fiction theme. You are controlling things through mind waves. But things like this have been around in various science museums for some time."
Goodale said a museum in Sarasota, Fla., displays a similar toy that pits two competitors against one another. Instead of floating a ball through an obstacle course, each player had to try to score a goal in a competitor's net. The person who could create and sustain the most brain activity would power a set of fans that pushed a foam ball into the rival's goal.
Scientists are also delving into the mind-over-matter technology, hoping to isolate specific brain activity with the goal of allowing people to interface with a computer or TV without a mouse, remote or a keyboard.
Other potential uses for the technology would include helping people who have lost their limbs to control robotic prosthetics.
"There are attempts to actually record activity of specific parts of the brain," said Goodale. "To use electrodes to record the activity of groups of cells of patients with spinal cord damage to get them to control robot arms, wheel chairs or cursors on a computer screen."
Science may be close to a breakthrough, according to Goodale.
He said several research papers detail advanced ways of capturing brain activity and tests are already under way.
The day when man and machine can communicate may not be far off.
"We've been working for 20 or 30 years on this mind-Borg or Cyborg stuff. All of these things are examples of new interfaces between humans and machines," said Steve Mann, a professor with the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto.
Mann himself has been called the world's first "cyborg," and is famous for having created "wearable computers" that allow him to interact with devices.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
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By Vito Pilieci, Ottawa CitizenJanuary 7, 2009
Source: Breakthrough toy can read your mind, move objects
OTTAWA — New technology that gives people the ability to move objects with their minds will soon be available at North American toy stores — and unlike those goofy X-ray specs from the 1960s, it will work.
Mattel Inc. has created a game that can read a child's mind and use thoughts to manoeuvre a small foam ball through a table-top obstacle course.
Called the Mind Flex, the game uses technology that reads the electrical impulses — called bio-feedback — that happen within a brain while a person is thinking.
A device that looks like a pair of headphones sits on the child's head and tracks brain activity. Within the obstacle course are small fans that are activated when a child thinks. The more brain activity a child produces, the faster the fans blow.
The game's goal is to have the child "think" the little foam ball through the obstacle course.
The toy, to be officially revealed this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, will be in stores later this year and will be targeted at children ages eight and older. It will retail for $80 US. Canadian pricing has not been released.
While the technology may sound like it came straight from Star Trek, researchers have long been working on ways to use brain activity to direct machines.
"It all goes back to neurofeedback that has been around for 50 years, where you can record activity coming from the human brain through the scalp," said Melvyn Goodale, Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario. "It has the outside look of a science-fiction theme. You are controlling things through mind waves. But things like this have been around in various science museums for some time."
Goodale said a museum in Sarasota, Fla., displays a similar toy that pits two competitors against one another. Instead of floating a ball through an obstacle course, each player had to try to score a goal in a competitor's net. The person who could create and sustain the most brain activity would power a set of fans that pushed a foam ball into the rival's goal.
Scientists are also delving into the mind-over-matter technology, hoping to isolate specific brain activity with the goal of allowing people to interface with a computer or TV without a mouse, remote or a keyboard.
Other potential uses for the technology would include helping people who have lost their limbs to control robotic prosthetics.
"There are attempts to actually record activity of specific parts of the brain," said Goodale. "To use electrodes to record the activity of groups of cells of patients with spinal cord damage to get them to control robot arms, wheel chairs or cursors on a computer screen."
Science may be close to a breakthrough, according to Goodale.
He said several research papers detail advanced ways of capturing brain activity and tests are already under way.
The day when man and machine can communicate may not be far off.
"We've been working for 20 or 30 years on this mind-Borg or Cyborg stuff. All of these things are examples of new interfaces between humans and machines," said Steve Mann, a professor with the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto.
Mann himself has been called the world's first "cyborg," and is famous for having created "wearable computers" that allow him to interact with devices.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
____________________________________
