60 Facebook Engineers Are Working On How To Read Your Mind And Type Using Brain

Short Bytes: At its developer conference F8, Facebook unveiled the details of its super-secret brain-computer interface. Being developed by Facebook’s mysterious Building 8 (B8), this “silent speech interface” will allow the users to type faster using their brain. B8’s head Regina Dugan also introduced another skin-hearing project.

Facebook’s developer conference F8 is known to show off company’s upcoming products and research work. Yesterday, in his F8 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s foray into Augmented Reality with its camera platform. It was followed by an exciting announcement from Facebook’s mysterious Building 8 (B8).

Facebook started its Building 8 team to create futuristic gadgets. On Wednesday, the company revealed the details of two of the six projects that are underway. Regina Dugan, the head of Building 8, explained that a team of 60 engineers is working to build a brain-computer interface.

Dugan has previously headed Google’s similar Advanced Technology and Projects Group; she was also the director of the Pentagon’s DARPA research agency.

This interface will let you type with just your mind without the use of any implants. By using advanced techniques like optical imaging that scan your brain a hundred times per second, this interface will detect what you’re speaking in your head and convert it into text.

Dugan calls it a “silent speech interface” with the convenience of voice and privacy of text.

She shared Facebook’s goal regarding the same. Over the next two years, B8 aims to build systems that will enable you to type at 100 words per minute using mind, which is 5-times faster than typing on the phone.

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In her presentation, Dugan showed a video of paralyzed medical patient at Stanford. Using a sensor, the patient was able to type.

Facebook also showed off its progress on a way for humans to hear using the skin. This technology could help deaf people hear. In the demonstration, a Facebook team was shown experimenting with skin hearing using actuators tuned to 16 frequency bands. The test subject developed a vocabulary of 9 words they could listen through the skin.

So, are you excited to know about these futuristics technologies from Facebook? Are you a little skeptical? Don’t forget to share your views with us.

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