Japan is renowned for its hi-tech gadgets but it has crossed a new frontier with the prospect of remotely controlling humans.
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT) has invented a headset that can move people from left to right at the flick of a joystick. The headset delivers a weak electrical current just behind the ear affecting the vestibular system, which controls movement and balance.
Galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) has been around for years, but is only now gaining attention with the new research. When an electrical current is fired, the body shifts its balance towards the electrode. If the current is strong enough, the person with a headset will walk in the direction the charge was sent.
NTT showed off its headset at a recent computer graphics conference in Los Angeles, where participants eagerly signed up to be controlled from a small radio transmitter.
Yuri Kageyama, an Associated Press reporter who tried out the headset at NTT's research centre in Japan said he found the experience "unnerving and exhausting" and likened it to being drunk. It felt like an "invisible hand" reaching inside the brain, he added.
The technology builds on similar research by the Cyberkinetics company, which helps paralysed patients play video games through the electrical currents created by thoughts, andresearchers from State University in New York, who manipulated the movements of rats by threading their brains with electric wires. The NTT researchers say they have no immediate plans for commercial development but are considering the possibilities for video gaming.
Japan is renowned for its hi-tech gadgets but it has crossed a new frontier with the prospect of remotely controlling humans.
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT) has invented a headset that can move people from left to right at the flick of a joystick. The headset delivers a weak electrical current just behind the ear affecting the vestibular system, which controls movement and balance.
Galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) has been around for years, but is only now gaining attention with the new research. When an electrical current is fired, the body shifts its balance towards the electrode. If the current is strong enough, the person with a headset will walk in the direction the charge was sent.
NTT showed off its headset at a recent computer graphics conference in Los Angeles, where participants eagerly signed up to be controlled from a small radio transmitter.
Yuri Kageyama, an Associated Press reporter who tried out the headset at NTT's research centre in Japan said he found the experience "unnerving and exhausting" and likened it to being drunk. It felt like an "invisible hand" reaching inside the brain, he added.
The technology builds on similar research by the Cyberkinetics company, which helps paralysed patients play video games through the electrical currents created by thoughts, andresearchers from State University in New York, who manipulated the movements of rats by threading their brains with electric wires. The NTT researchers say they have no immediate plans for commercial development but are considering the possibilities for video gaming.
-------------------- My views are my own and do not reflect those of everyone else... and I wouldn't have it any other way.
posted
Great. Too weird...Reality is stranger than fiction. I like how they are excited about the possibilities of gaming instead of helping crippled people...Nice.
-------------------- I just can't BLOK it out!
From: The land of toys and stinky diapers!!! | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
First rule of medicine for profit. Can't treat a cured individual as annuity income. Unless you can sell a paralysis cure using a subscription model.
posted
Just the other week I was watching THE AVENGERS episode, "The Return Of The Cybernauts". In it, a group of kidnapped scientists are coerced into coming up with a device very much like the one described above, to be used to turn people (victims) into "human cybernauts", who will have no control over their bodies, but be fully aware of every moment-- until the guy in control decides it's time to kill them.
Registered: Aug 2003
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posted
Exciting moments in torture history? Sounds awful (or awfully kinky) to me - "an invisible hand reaching inside the brain" - who would want that? I wouldn't even want to try it, maybe it scrambles your brain in some as yet unknown manner. At some point, they're going to overcome the necessity of a headset and get right into your brain from the remote. Why did I pick up that package of chips at the store? Something just made me do it...
How would it be used in gaming? At some point, the machinery makes you move - or as part of the game, you make somebody else your puppet? Creepy.
It is sad that this type of research could possibly lead to cure or remediation for human paralysis, but commercial interests will undoubtedly push it in another, less benign or beneficent direction.
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