Video: Brain -> Twitter Interface
From the UW Madison press release:
The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. "The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually," says Williams. "And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."Whew. We're safe for now.Wilson, who used the interface to post the Twitter update, likens it to texting on a cell phone. "You have to press a button four times to get the character you want," he says of texting. "So this is kind of a slow process at first."
However, as with texting, users improve as they practice using the interface. "I've seen people do up to eight characters per minute," says Wilson.
I believe this is the tweet in question.
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Developing neural interfaces is important and all, and there's a certain coolness factor here, but how is this system any better than Twittering via an eyetracking system?
One step up and two steps back.
Would an eyetracking interface work with a blind person?
Or, I suppose, would this interface work with a blind person as well? Intriguing none-the-less.
Who actually texts from a dumbphone without using T9 or other predictive system? I don't think people actually become proficient at the press-the-button-multiple-times method - rather they switch to a better entry system if they're doing a lot of texting. Or they buy a cheap-ass QWERTY phone.
This looks interesting, but what an analogy fail that was...