A Headset That Reads Your Mind and a Robotic Arm With Natural Control

Back in the 90's, it was all about VR headsets: how to get the virtual environment to enter your brain thru your eyes with a full 360° view.

Now a new kind of futuristic headset is appearing: the EEG (Electro EncephaloGram) headset. Its purpose is to literally read your mind and transform your thoughts, or more reasonably facial muscles and concentration patterns, and turn them into commands.

Emotiv Systems, from San Francisco, revealed this back in March and they tout it as a game controller. More info in this article from technology Review here.

Other ways of transforming brain and nerve signals into commands are gaining momentum, with very impressive applications in advanced prosthetics. The latest is a very impressive "Proto 1" developed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in hope to "bring more natural control of prostheses, better artificial limbs and make a difference in the lives of amputees worldwide". More info in this article from ScienceBlog.

Proto 1 is a prototype of the first fully integrated prosthetic arm that can be controlled naturally, provide sensory feedback and allows for eight degrees of freedom—a level of control far beyond the current state of the art for prosthetic limbs. It works thanks to the "transfer of residual nerves from an amputated limb to unused muscle regions in appropriate proximity to the injury".

The team is not stopping there: the next Proto 2 will have "more than 25 degrees of freedom and the strength and speed of movement approaching the capabilities of the human limb, combined with more than 80 individual sensory elements for feedback of touch, temperature, and limb position."

This is all getting us closer to the common sci-fi definition of a Cyborg: half man / half machine. And it's all for fun or for health. I think it's a good think, but I think people should be more aware of it.

Did I ever mention that we are living in science fiction?

How Piracy Can be Caused by DRM, by Poor Legitimate Distribution and by Poor Legitimate Experiences

Once in a while a smart and insightful article is written about piracy and DRM in the digital age. Eric Flint wrote one of those a while ago, entitled "There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch". It's essentially about DRM/piracy in digital books, but these thoughts can be applied just as well to digital music and video.

Here is how his article starts:

I ended my last essays as follows:

Is it true that modern electronic devices have made copyright infringement "so effortless" that it has become—or threatens to become—a serious menace to legitimate copyright owners?

The answer is "no." In the next issue, I'll explain why.

The reason the answer is "no," in a nutshell, is encapsulated in the subtitle of this essay: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

I like that he is so straight to the point - here is a memorable extract:

Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an "economic epidemic" under certain conditions. Any one of the following:

1) The products they want—electronic texts—are hard to find, and thus valuable.

2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.

3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.

Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises.

And . . .

Guess what? It's precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called online piracy, it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward.

So, I advise you to read it entirely here.

The DRMs that are imposed on music, for yet a few more months until they disappear altogether, have impeded digital music distribution with a strong factor #3.It's a digital product which is deliberately made worse than its physical counterpart.

I will tell you about a simple personal real-life situation: I have most of my music library in MP3 form, which I chose over AAC when ripping my CD collection, even though it takes more space, simply because it's more compatible. Then I also have a few albums impeded by FairPlay DRM because I bought them on iTunes Music Store. I mostly play my music from my Mac at home and my iPod on the go. But once, I needed to get my music on my PSP and guess what, it all worked just fine EXCEPT for the music I had bought on iTunes - this "Fair" (!!!) music only plays on iPods. As a consumer there is no way I can accept that. So I will just avoid purchasing music on iTunes and continue buying CDs, until the market stabilizes on DRM-free music.

To my mind, video piracy in Europe is fueled mostly by the factor #1: because we have to wait months before movies are played in theaters and longer for them to come out on DVD and even more to find them on VOD. I add a touch of factor #3 because on French TV, and in many other countries, you can't see the original version of movies because they are always dubbed.

Same goes for TV series: think of their viewers as fans and sometimes even addicts - how can you expect them to wait months or even years to find out what happens in the current season of "Lost" or "24" or "The Shield" or "The Sopranos"? It is too hard to wait, too hard to get the product thru legitimate  channels - that's a strong incentive to pirate that content.

Concerning TV series I will add an additional factor #3/#2 because when you watch them on TV, you often miss episodes (factor #3), it is much better to watch on DVD, but that costs you around 60..80€ for a season, which is very expensive (factor #2). Piracy lets you watch this content months or years in advance, with the original language, without missing a single episode - the only trouble is that you can't pay for that service: it's free, and it's not legitimate.

Let me conclude with an optimistic touch: I have faith in the Internet and I have faith in market pressures to eventually solve this situation. I'm just in a big hurry to get there!

Amazon Mistakenly Pushing Sex Toys

Can you believe that?

An e-mail presenting sex toys from Amazon, designed for people who had shopped in their sex toy section, was sent out to people who had never bought that kind of stuff.

The Register has the story - I don't have time to verify it, but generally I trust them, and April's fool is already done for.

Or could it be a viral ad voluntary "faker error" in order to bring attention to the fact that they sell sex toys too?

Brain Emulation - The Early Days

Can you imagine that computers will be able to emulate human intelligence?

Well it's starting to become a reality in the field of computer vision, as I found on that article by Science Daily:

In a new MIT study, a computer model designed to mimic the way the brain itself processes visual information performs as well as humans do on rapid categorization tasks. The model even tends to make similar errors as humans, possibly because it so closely follows the organization of the brain's visual system.

"This is the first time a model has been able to reproduce human behavior on that kind of task." said senior author Tomaso Poggio of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.

That actually implies that very soon, computers, robots, and digital devices in general will be able to detect what they are seeing as well as people do. Still many steps away from your average friendly sci-fi robot, but closing in, don't you think?

Protecting Innovation in Cyborgs

I saw this news on Slashdot. Even research in Cyborgs needs protection: Amazon has just filed a patent on human/machine integration.

And the patent is here.

Universcale - Total Perspective on the Size of Things

Check out this flash presentation created by Nikon which puts on a single animated scale the different orders of magnitude from the infinitely large to the infinitely small.

It tends to make you dizzy, but it is impressive. Especially when you realize that the nano scale (e.g.: nanotubes) is a major direction of current research. Indeed nanotechnologies will enable us to accomplish things that today would be classified as magic.

Cuban Says the CD is Dead Long Live Music

A good article by Marc Cuban on Blog Maverick, analyzing the music not only as entertainment media but also as a way to make a statement about yourself.

Like Marc I am convinced that buying a CD Player is obsolete. To my mind, CD sales are only surviving for 2 reasons:

• CD-Audio is the only universal way to get DRM-free music. Note that EMI is rumored to announce DRM-free music on iTunes music store today, and many others will probably follow. So this privilege of the CD is soon to disappear.
• CD-Audio is an object that you can offer, display and it serves as a backup for your digital music.

I believe these reasons are probably going to fade away in the years to come. What do you think?

Free P2P Content With Ads

BitTorrent is continuing to innovate in the field of "legal" P2P downloads. Now they are testing ad-suported free content. The content is from G4 TV (gaming network) and the ads come from YuMe Networks.

I found this news on NewTeeVee, and it doesn't say anything about DRM so I guess it is still used on that content, which is a pity as everyone knows because it impedes viewing on so many computers.