The Hands-Free Future

Say goodbye to grimy keyboards. Here are four innovations that merge man and machine

By Lisa Katayama Posted 10.22.2008 at 12:01 pm 5 Comments

Look Ma, No Hands! Eye movement, Wii remotes, vocal cords and mere thought may one day soon control everything from computers to cameras to wheelchairs. Image by pixelgarden.com

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Using motion sensors, brain signals and a heap of creativity, several new technologies promise to do away with cramped typing fingers, videogame-fried eyes and hoarse phone voices. This past summer in Tokyo, for instance, a paralyzed man with electrodes attached to his head took his Second Life avatar on a virtual walk just by envisioning his character strolling. Engineers at a biotech start-up in Illinois are now testing a neck device that allows mute people to speak by intercepting nerve signals en route to the vocal cords, and a team of grad students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has devised a Wii-mote-controlled PC game for the blind.

Scientists already have the know-how to make mind control a reality. The rest is engineering, says Rodney Brooks, a roboticist at MIT. “It’s only a matter of time before it will be normal for people to interface with the virtual world using direct connections to their brain,” he predicts. “We’ll be able to activate any of our machines just by thinking about it.” It’s a nifty idea for all of mankind, but even more so for those who struggle to talk, walk, and see. Click here to see the top notable mind-control devices making headlines.

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5 Comments

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Deco

from Sao Paulo, SP

10/23/08 at 10:38 am

I'll just leave a question. How can you control which devices should be reading your brain waves and which devices shouldn't?

Dangerous thoughts...

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boka

10/23/08 at 10:51 am

Will this bring us to a singularity?

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njdevil

10/23/08 at 1:22 pm

OK, helping paralysis victims operate wheelchairs makes sense, but the eyeball remote? Is staring and blinking at your iPod in a particular way any better than using the buttons? It is just technology for technology's sake (or rather, technology for being-the-latest-must-have-gadget's sake)

That said, I wouldn't mind an iPod that could be controlled with voice commands, with an iPhone style microphone on the ear piece wire. asking the ipod to play you a particular song sounds cool.

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extremechiton

10/24/08 at 11:02 pm

voice command is kinda cool.

i did this once with my phone and a bluetooth head set.

i used the bluetooth's voice command to play my phones mp3 from a different room.

if an ipod had bluetooth that would be sweet. =D

but eyeball controll for an ipod might be tricky.

id better use eye remote technology in security systems. such as ur getting robbed and u stare at ur cash registers eyethingy to signal a lockdown, call 911 and record the incident. :D

rnt i a genius!

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techgirl

11/05/08 at 10:59 am

Don't forget that hands-free software is here and a keyboard and mouse can be replaced right now by talkingdesktop software, able software, etc and with speech recognition and text-to-speech. These are not the only companies in this field who ares offering a voice command option with hands-free computer operation. This future is the present right now for many people with disabilities where speech gives them access to the internet and computer control.