Source: TechCrunch

Agnes Pan

  

At its F8 developer conference today, Facebook revealed that it has a special team of 60 engineers working on interfaces between the brain and computers that will allow people to type with ease “with their minds.” But the research won’t implant anything in the brain. The team plans to use optical imaging to scan the brain hundreds of times a second to detect thoughts in people’s heads and translate them into words.


 

Regina Dugan, head of Building 8, Facebook’s research and development arm, took the stage the morning after the conference to present Facebook’s plans for a brain-computer interface. The ultimate goal, she explained to attendees, is for people to type 100 words per minute and communicate five times faster than a phone call.

 

Eventually, the brain-computer interface will allow humans to control AR and VR experiences with their brains, rather than using hardware such as screens or controllers. Over the past two days, Facebook’s CEO and CTO have spoken in detail about this “direct to the brain” technology at F8.

 


Let your brain type directly

 


“What if you could control your brain and type directly with your mind?” Dugan asked at the beginning of his speech. She then showed a video of a Stanford university lab that had managed to get a paralyzed patient to type directly from his brain. In the video, because the patient has a sensor implanted in his brain, the sensor can transmit exactly what’s on his mind. However, she further stressed that Facebook will achieve the same effect without having to implant sensors.

 

In fact, Building 8 started the brain typing project only six months ago. But the team is already collaborating with the University of California, San Francisco, university of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis. Many researchers specializing in machine learning speech decoding and language research are involved in the construction of advanced optical neuroimaging system.



The ultimate goal is to build non-implantable devices that can be transported on a large scale. In an effort to allay some of the inevitable fears that this study might engender, Facebook says, “We don’t just jump at any random thought. We’re just interpreting what people are agreeing to share and sending to the language centers of the brain.” Facebook’s analogy is that we take a lot of photos but only share some of them. Even with a specific device, the user is completely free to choose which ideas to translate into words.

 



Let your skin hear

 

Building 8 is also working on ways to allow humans to hear directly through their skin. The team is building prototypes of hardware and software that will allow the human skin to mimic the cochlea in the ear and convert sound to specific frequencies for transmission to the brain. The technology allows deaf people to hear almost all sounds without using their ears.

 

A team of Facebook engineers demonstrated experiments with hearing through the skin using an actuator system tuned to 16 bands. The test subjects managed to say nine words they heard through their skin.



To underscore the power of these technologies, Dugan opened her presentation by saying she had never seen anything as powerful as a smartphone, “anything we can think of.” She added humorously that it would be better if we consciously looked up from time to time while using our phones. But at the same time, she believes that technology can enhance human relationships and advance education and the development of a global society.

 


The secret of Building 8

  


Last year, Facebook hired Dugan to lead a new lab called Building 8, which has been shrouded in mystery. Before that, Dugan was head of Advanced technology and products at Google and served as head of DARPA.



Facebook created a special Area 404 zone at its Menlo Park headquarters, with a lot of mechanical engineering equipment, to help Dugan’s team quickly develop new hardware. In December, Building 8 signed partnerships with Stanford university, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to enlist the help and support of academia.



  

But until now, no one knew exactly what Building 8 was developing.

 

According to some of the positions listed, Facebook is looking for a brain-computer interface engineer to lead a B8 project to develop advanced BCI technology. The company is also looking for a neuroimaging engineer who can develop new, non-invasive neuroimaging techniques.

 

Neuralink, a start-up run by Elon Musk, is also working on a brain-computer interface.

 

Facebook has had some success with hardware such as Terragraph Wi-Fi nodes, Project ARIES antennas, and Aquila solar-powered drones. It also developed and open-source the Surround 360 camera. For back-end infrastructure, it developed an Open network switch called Wedge, an Open Vault with storage capabilities, and more. Facebook already has its own VR wearables through its acquisition of Oculus.

 

But as Facebook grew, it had more and more resources and talent to innovate on hardware. What’s more, with more than 1.8 billion users worldwide, Facebook apps have plenty of subjects to experiment with.



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