Facebook has unveiled radical plans for new technology that would allow you to type using your thoughts.
The announcement was made at Facebook's F8 conference by Regina Dugan, head of Facebook's Building 8 research lab.
"You have many thoughts, you choose to share some of them," said Dugan, a former director of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). "We're talking about decoding those words. A silent speech interface – one with all the speed and flexibility of voice."
The social media giant is actively researching the technology, which it describes as a "brain mouse for AR". A team of researchers at Stanford has already enabled a paralysed woman to type eight words per minute using her thoughts, but this experiment made use of an invasive brain implant.
Clearly this solution isn't practical or desirable for the majority of people. Facebook imagines its thought-type technology functioning with no implants, while allowing users to type 100 words per minute.
The tech is currently a long way from this goal, but every radical innovation has to start somewhere. Even "something as simple as a yes-no brain click" could change the way we interact with tech, says Dugan.
"Our brains produce enough data to stream 4 HD movies every second," added Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook page. "The problem is that the best way we have to get information out into the world – speech – can only transmit about the same amount of data as a 1980s modem.
"We're working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain about 5x faster than you can type on your phone today. Eventually, we want to turn it into a wearable technology that can be manufactured at scale."
Facebook now has a team of 60 scientists from various universities working on creating an implant which would function in a medical setting. The challenge after that is to create wearable tech which performs a similar function from outside the skull.
It's thinking cap time.
