Facebook will soon let you type with your brain

“Similarly, you have many thoughts and choose to share only some of them”, she said.

According to The Guardian, Building 8’s head of hardware innovation Regina Dugan described the effort as a way of breaking the spell of people being mesmerised to their screens to have a conversation online. Their aim is to create a system that is capable of typing 100 words in a minute straight from your brain that too without burring a hole in your skull (like the traditional sensors that are directly connected to the brain).

“That is why we love great writers and poets, because they are just a little bit better at compressing the fullness of a thought into words”.

While Dugan didn’t go into specifics about how the project works and how they plan to improve it going forward, she did say that a hardware release of any sort was still just a distant possibility. “However, such technology remains years away though”.

Facebook Inc on Wednesday pulled aside the curtain on a secretive unit headed by a former chief of the Pentagon’s research arm, disclosing that the social media company is studying ways for people to communicate by thought and touch. But hating the device for that was “the wrong narrative”, she said.

60 engineers are now working on the technology from clandestine Building 8 – Facebook’s innovative product research and development hub. Similar to Braille, the technology would rely on manipulating the nerve endings in the skin to send and receive messages. This event is targeted at developers but is watched by tech fans around the world. The armband’s system of actuators was tuned to 16 frequency bands, and has a tactile vocabulary of nine words, learned in about an hour.

Dugan adds that it’s also possible to “listen” to human speech by using your skin. And nothing is more promising or intriguing than what’s coming out of Facebook’s mysterious Building 8 (B8). “What if we could type directly from our brain into a computer?” The technology will then convert the thoughts into text.

The end goal is to build an online world that feels more immersive and real-no doubt so that you spend more time on Facebook.

The issue, Zuckerberg posited in his post, is that our brain produces data equivalent to streaming four high-definition movies every second, but our speech is limited in how much of that data it can transfer.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote address at Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference on Tuesday at McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California.

Because basic systems in use today now don’t operate in real-time and require surgery to implant electrodes-a giant barrier we’ve yet to surmount-Facebook’s new team is researching non-invasive sensors based on optical imaging that Dugan says would need to sample data at hundreds of times per second and precise to millimeters. Each thing we learn about it seems to lead to more mysteries that we have yet to understand.