Telepathy tech

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This may sound like a far-fetched idea dreamt up by a child with an active imagination, but when you learn that this was the prophecy of Mark Zuckerberg, it becomes harder to dismiss as fantasy. The Facebook CEO made his prediction during a recent online Q&A session, where he was asked about Facebook’s focus for the future.

Zuckerberg explained that the site was looking to improve on a number of trends within human communication. “People are gaining the power to share in richer and richer ways. We used to just share in text, and now we post mainly with photos,” he said. “In the future, video will be even more important than photos. After that, immersive experiences like virtual reality will become the norm. And after that, we’ll have the power to share our full sensory and emotional experience with people whenever we’d like.”

Added to this, Zuckerberg went on, is the idea that although portable devices give people the power to communicate more frequently, we only use them periodically throughout the day. He believes that technology such as augmented reality and other devices will soon be worn all the time, and this is what could lead to us ultimately being able to communicate via thoughts.

Zuckerberg isn’t alone in thinking along these lines. A recent campaign launched by MoneySuperMarket encouraged drivers to ‘use their heads’ and compete to win the experience of driving a mind-controlled electric car. The price comparison website teamed up with Splendid Communications and Kerve Design to fit out a car with wireless technology.

Drivers were trained on special software using an EEG (electroencephalography) headset with 16 sensor pads that measured brain activity. The software assigned brain activity to certain functions – learning each user’s ‘unique mental topography’ – and sent a radio frequency signal to a robot inside the car, which turned the wheel and pressed on the accelerator and the brake.

The BBC has also been investigating ‘telepathy tech’. The broadcaster has trialled existing technology that could allow people with limited or no mobility to access its on-demand iPlayer TV service, using just their brain power.

“We’re always keeping an eye out for how we can innovate using new technologies,” says Cyrus Saihan, head of business development at the BBC. “We saw that there was some new, relatively low-cost tech available on the market that allowed you to control electronic devices – at quite a basic level – by measuring the brain’s activity.”

Saihan’s team invested in a brainwave-reading headset – bought online for around £100 – and starting working with This Place, a UK-based user experience company. Together, they developed an interface between the headset and a tablet: effectively a very experimental internal prototype version of iPlayer.

The headset, Saihan explains, has one small sensor that sits on a user’s forehead, and another clip that attaches to their earlobe. These sensors measure electrical activity in the brain: certain types of electrical activity correspond with different moods, he explains, meaning that brainwaves associated with either concentration or relaxation can be differentiated.

“We gave users the option to select either [concentration or relaxation] as the control mechanism,” Saihan explains. “If they had selected relaxation, the headset monitored the level of relaxation that they were experiencing at that point in time. When that relaxation reached a certain threshold – when there was enough of those types of brainwaves – a message was sent from the headset to the device, telling it to perform an action. In this case, it was to initially to launch the application.

“The next part was that users were presented with five of the most popular TV programmes at that point in time. Each programme was highlighted for 10 seconds at a time. When the user wanted to watch a programme they would relax when that particular one was highlighted. Again, when their level of relaxation reached a certain level, it would open up that programme and enable them to watch it.

“So you’ve gone from a situation where you’ve turned the app on and you’re watching a particular programme just by using your brainwaves.”

The project, Saihan insists, was just a “toe in the water” to give colleagues at the BBC, as well as the wider industry, an idea of what might be possible, both in terms of improving the accessibility of content, and as a way of developing new user interfaces.

“It’s the kind of thing that you would think is just impossible – it seems so out there,” Saihan says. “So the fact that, even though it’s at a basic level at the moment, the fact that you can do these kind of basic applications is still quite interesting.

“At the rate tech changes, who knows what might happen in 10, 20, 30 years’ time. Our children might be using these things in the way we use keyboards.”

This article originally appeared in the October 2015 issue of Impact magazine