Showing posts with label psychological. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychological. Show all posts
Robotic Pillow Phone Lets You Hug The Person You’re Calling
Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, Director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory in Japan, is known for his life-like androids. His latest creation may not resemble a realistic human, but these body-shaped pillows are equipped with two vibrators that mimic heartbeats. The Hugvie robot connects to your mobile phone and responds the caller’s voice. The throbbing vibrations become faster and stronger depending on the pitch, volume, and mood of the caller.
via PSFK: http://www.psfk.com/2012/04/robotic-pillow-phone.html#ixzz1tXDxwbQv
Telepathy machine reconstructs speech from brainwaves
When you read this sentence to yourself, it’s likely that you hear the words in your head. Now, in what amounts to technological telepathy, others are on the verge of being able to hear your inner dialogue too. By peering inside the brain, it is possible to reconstruct speech from the activity that takes place when we hear someone talking.
Because this brain activity is thought to be similar whether we hear a sentence or think the same sentence, the discovery brings us a step closer to broadcasting our inner thoughts to the world without speaking. The implications are enormous – people made mute through paralysis or locked-in syndrome could regain their voice. It might even be possible to read someone’s mind.
Imagine a musician watching a piano being played with no sound, says Brian Pasley at the University of California, Berkeley. “If a pianist were watching a piano being played on TV with the sound off, they would still be able to work out what the music sounded like because they know what key plays what note,” Pasley says. His team has done something analogous with brain waves, matching neural areas to their corresponding noises.
via New Scientist and Popsci
Read the research here.
Soon, You May Download New Skills to Your Brain
New research suggests it may be possible to learn complex tasks with little to no conscious effort, just like in The Matrix.
PROBLEM: Unlike Neo in The Matrix or the titular superspy in the comedy series Chuck, we can't master kung fu just by beaming information to our brain. We have to put in time and effort to learn new skills.
METHODOLOGY: Researchers from Boston University and Japan's ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories designed a decoded functional MRI neurofeedback method that induces a pre-recorded activation pattern in targeted early visual brain areas that could also produce the pattern through regular learning. They then tested whether repetitions of the fMRI pattern caused an improvement in the performance of that visual feature.
RESULTS: The experiments successfully demonstrated that, through a person's visual cortex, decoded fMRI could be used to impart brain activity patterns that match a previously known target state. Interestingly, behavioral data obtained before and after the neurofeedback training showed improved performance of the relevant visual tasks especially when the subjects were unaware of the nature of what they were learning.
Read more at The Atlantic
Ready for the robot revolution?
Robots are about to invade our lives.
From performing household chores, to entertaining and educating our children, to looking after the elderly, roboticists say we will soon be welcoming their creations into our homes and workplaces.
Researchers believe we are on the cusp of a robot revolution that will mirror the explosive growth of the computer revolution from the 1980s onwards.
They are developing new laws for robot behaviour, and designing new ways for humans and robots to interact.
"I think robotics technology will change who we are, just as eyeglasses and fire changed who we were before," says Rodney Brookes, robotics entrepreneur and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
via BBC
NeuroFocus Uses Neuromarketing To Hack Your Brain
Orange cheese dust. That wholly unnatural neon stuff that gloms onto your fingers when you're mindlessly snacking on chips or doodles. The stuff you don't think about until you realize you've smeared it on your shirt or couch cushions--and then keep on eating anyway, despite your better intentions. Orange cheese dust is probably not the first thing you think of when talking about how the brain functions, but it's exactly the kind of thing that makes NeuroFocus, and neuromarketing in general, such a potentially huge and growing business. In 2008, Frito-Lay hired NeuroFocus to look into Cheetos, the junk-food staple. After scanning the brains of a carefully chosen group of consumers, the NeuroFocus team discovered that the icky coating triggers an unusually powerful response in the brain: a sense of giddy subversion that consumers enjoy over the messiness of the product. In other words, the sticky stuff is what makes those snacks such a sticky brand. Frito-Lay leveraged that information into its advertising campaign for Cheetos, which has made the most of the mess. For its efforts, NeuroFocus earned a Grand Ogilvy award for advertising research, given out by the Advertising Research Foundation, for "demonstrating the most successful use of research in the creation of superior advertising that achieves a critical business objective."
via FastCompany
Disney Tactile Device Lets Games and Movies Literally Send Chills Down Your Spine
Disney researchers apparently don’t feel that your video games are realistic enough. Engineers at the company’s Pittsburgh research facility have devised something they call “Tactile Brush” that creates the sensory illusion of objects moving against a person’s skin, mimicking everything from crawling insects to the forces exerted by a car taking a hard corner. And soon enough, it could be integrated into everything from gaming systems to movie theater seats.
Tactile Brush works via a series of vibrating coils embedded in the back of a chair. These coils create illusions based on a variety of sensory phenomena that have been somewhat understood for decades but never really implemented into entertainment devices.
via New Scientist
Brazilian Cops Get Augmented Eyeglasses That Can Pick Guilty Faces Out of a Crowd
Police officers in Brazil will soon be adding a layer of cyborg tech to their law enforcement toolbox via glasses rigged with facial recognition tech. The glasses, dubbed “RoboCop” glasses, scan faces in a crowd and check them against a criminal database, and officers in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo have already been through demos with the technology.
At distances up to 50 yards, the glasses can reportedly scan 400 faces per second, comparing 46,000 biometric points on a person’s face against a database of terrorists and other criminals. If a match is made it is indicated by a red light that appears within the glasses frame, allowing police to zero in on those people with problematic pasts (or currently questionable legal statuses) without having to put police and citizens through the tedium of random ID checks.
via AOL News
The Social Web of Things
Ericsson believes that in the Networked Society, more than 50 billion things will be connected, in order to make our lives and our businesses more efficient and more enjoyable.
Japan develops mobile phone with human touch
Japan's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) researcher Takashi Minato displays a human-shaped mobile phone in Tokyo.The human-shaped mobile phone has a skin-like outer layer that enables users to feel closer to those on the other end.
Japanese researchers said Thursday they have developed a human-shaped mobile phone with a skin-like outer layer that enables users to feel closer to those on the other end.
via PhysOrg
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)