It must be admitted that seeing words like "Telepathic" in the WSJ's exclusive news would feel very strange - if IN2 were not aware of this year's mystery technical team in Facebook's new hardware incubator Building 8 One of the ongoing research and development projects is led by a former neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, involving brain scan technology.
Use light to reflect the active part of the brain and interpret human language
Recently, WSJ reporters got a clearer message after communicating with the people involved in the project in Building 8: Facebook is indeed developing a more efficient and high-risk technology as a disruptive human-computer communication method to change humans through computers. Digital exchanges, redefining the "next computing era."
Leading technology leader, physicist and neuroscientist Mark Chevillet of Facebook, the "not yet officially named" project, said that when you wear a VR helmet to enter the virtual world, or wear a pair of AR glasses to move around in the real environment , you can hardly touch the keyboard or mouse accurately. The simplest and most effective way that Facebook thinks of controlling VR/AR systems is to communicate directly with the “brain†without hands.
It sounds like a pull, but after understanding the principle, you will understand that using light to transmit physical information is not a new topic. For more than a century, we have been using light to scan the human body. When scientists are researching animals in the laboratory, similar techniques are used to expose the brains of the animals being tested in order to visually observe the expansion and contraction of brain cells when exposed to light. The team of Facebook's Mark Chevillet mentioned above is doing the same thing, but this time the goal is not laboratory animals but humans themselves.
If you try to hold an open flashlight in your hand, you will see how the light penetrates the skin and muscles and illuminates the blood vessels. Based on this principle, Dr. Mark Chevillet and his team believe that their possible success is based on the fact that the sensor they are developing can recognize a part of the photon data, and the light will directly return to the detection after it has penetrated the skull and reflected from the neuron. The equipment is not spread like a flashlight.
At present, Facebook not only specially forms the above-mentioned internal technical team, but also recruits more than 60 scientists and engineers from different US research institutes as technical advisory groups and invests special funds (in millions of levels) for R&D.
The team’s goal is to update an existing technology concept and approach known as the “fast optical scattering†definition of vagueness. Simply put, it shines on the human brain, then detects the reflected light and interprets them. For Dr. Mark Chevillet's technical team. One problem that needs to be overcome now is how ordinary light penetrates the human skull, skin and hair.
What do the onlookers say
In theory this sensor technology is achievable. Similar projects supported by the U.S. Department of Defense have so far been conducted at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. It is used in sonar exploration, space exploration, and aerial observation of lush vegetation. At least until now this technology has not yet been opposed.
We () reported on Facebook's Building 8 incubator in March this year, not only mentioning neuroscience projects at Johns Hopkins University above. It also mentioned that Facebook will use the brain scanning technology it is developing to develop prosthetic products controlled by the brain.
However, Krishna Shenoy, a researcher from Stanford University and a leading researcher in the field of neuroprosthesis, said that if there is any evidence that Facebook's team can be implant-like, it can accurately sense brain activity from outside the skull, at least he himself. Not seen yet. At present, the greatest progress of Dr. Shenoy and his team in this area is to try to control the cursor on the virtual keyboard through the human brain, which can input 8 characters per minute, but even this requires brain implants.
Even if this “custom technology†of the US Department of Defense could be used to observe the human brain thinking mechanism, it would only solve half of the problems for the Facebook research team. The other half of the challenge is how to turn the brain's reading into the actual language.
Dr. Alexander Huth of the University of California, Berkeley, has nothing to do with Facebook's project. For eight years, Dr. has been working on how the brain deals with language issues. His research shows that language - as well as the concepts that language expresses - is spread across the surface of our brains. We can determine what the person is thinking about by looking at the active parts of the brain, at least the concept.
Dr. Huth believes that “reading†human thought is the greatest challenge – especially when we still know very little about how language works.
Using artificial intelligence research and development means - training computers to understand spoken language
For all the above-mentioned scientists and research institutes in related fields, "reading the brain" is not a new topic. But in Building 8, the R&D team is conducting research in the typical "Facebook way": using artificial intelligence. This may not be so familiar to other scientific teams.
Dr. Chevillet said that if he and his team can get enough data from the right place in the brain, they can acquire algorithms by training machine learning, correlate neural activity with language, and extract vocabulary in the brain. Similar to how scientists train computers to understand spoken language.
When the WSJ reporter explained Facebook's project to Richard Barbour, vice president of NIRx Medical Technology, the latter hesitated for a long time to reply, "I can't say it's impossible, but we won't do it." The studio-associated NIRx medical technology company is also a pioneer in the development of brain imaging technology based on light transmission.
Did Zuckerberg go crazy or did he want to "define the next computing era"?
Although neuroscientists and engineers outside of Facebook feel that this is not very reliable, they are extremely skeptical of success in this direction. But Facebook doesn't care at all. We are continuing to invest millions in research and development. According to the information disclosed at the F8 conference in mid-April of this year, Facebook’s investment in VR/AR direction makes it necessary to develop the ultimate way to allow people to control the system in an immersive environment. Obviously, this can't be a mouse, keyboard, or even a touchscreen and a small glove. For the future "no screen" multidimensional space, it seems that voice is not a good choice.
Considering that the rear of the head is not so extreme, the answer seems to be to put a little hardware on the head (it is said to be a headband-like device). This small hardware not only allows people to enter an immersive environment, but also “Read brains†and “translate ideas into exact language†to achieve human communication in virtual space.
This idea is basically what the other giants in Silicon Valley are thinking about. Building 8's manager is Regina Dugan, former executor of DARPA (United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). In April last year, he moved from Google’s Advanced Projects Department to the Silicon Valley’s Facebook Incubator, which is known as the “Tech Veterans Clubâ€. . All items in the incubator have strict budgets and deadlines, and no significant progress within two years will be closed. To date, none of the well-known scholars in this incubator have made any publicly announced breakthroughs.
Dr. Mark Chevillet, who is “Reading Brain,†said that we think this is a high-risk and high-return thing.
postscript
The entire Facebook and Zuckerberg are the best proof of high risk and high returns. 10 years ago, if we talk about what Facebook can do today, we don't know if people at that time will have the reaction we heard today to the “brain read†project. However, the existence and development path of a certain class of people and certain things is the same: For most people, it is the nonsense that is the meaning of their survival. These people can be called Zuckerberg, also called Jobs. Others can only be called "other people." They can learn to use the iPhone and Facebook, but they never seem to know how crazy these concepts are when they first appear.
When Google is trying to expand its immersive space program with mobile phones and glasses boxes, Apple is called "the world's largest AR content platform" overnight. Looks like lost Zuckerberg seems to have already begun the next step - even if the industry has not agreed that he "in the VR billions of empty space".
To be rich is the greatest goodwill God has given to a genius.
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