"Put on the Meta 2 headset, and ten holographic computer screens will hover in mid-air. Press the floating Amazon.com webpage with Nike sneakers and the shoes pop out. You can pull the image apart and examine the inner soles. A phone icon appears in front of you, ringing. Press it, and the caller appears in holographic form. She can hand you a model of the Vienna Opera House; you can hold it and turn it around.
With Meta’s technology, you become the operating system by controlling 3D content with your hands. Meta is a smaller player in the growing field of augmented reality, which puts digital images on top of the real world. (It’s not virtual reality, a more immersive experience that attempts to replace the world around you)."
The problem with using hands is very wide range motion. Using finger/wrist movement is better. VR needs something very different, like eyeball tracking. Basically trying to bring real world control scheme into vr is wrong, because real world movement is not fast/efficient enough.
Also, at this point someone should’ve developed an EEG-based input device already. I remember reading an article about possibility of a machine reading human thoughts (basically, when you think using words you send speaking impulses to lips/vocal chords. Those can be read and deciphered. You’ll need a sensor placed on your skin, though). The article was written in 1960s.
Reliable EEG machines are still too big and that toy Emotiv is (which is basically what you want, EEG-based device) more often DOESN’T work that it works. I had an occasion to test it, so I know.
Personally I’m waiting until MRI machines gets small enough to be put in a helmet-like device. MRI and especially fMRI are better at “reading” someone’s mind. If we could then induce a dream-like state, with sleep paralysis and translate world into brain pulses via transcranial stimulation… BAM, actual, true VR, like in Matrix.
That’s current MRI tech. MRI tech of tomorrow may not have that problem. For instance they could find a way to use less strong electromagnets than in medical-grade MRI machines that will still be able to “read” someone’s mind, but be more compact and less prone to issue you shown in the spoiler.
Kinda like differences between military GPS and civilian GPS. Civilian GPS is still useful and quite compact, but military one is more precise (and antennas required to use it are quite bulky as well).
//edit: More appropriate example: Differences between mobile cameras and real ones: Mobile cameras have less resolution and image fidelity, but you can still recognize object taken with it, so they’re useful for their intended purpose. They also are very compact so they can fit in your phone along with other stuff. “Real” cameras on the other hand have great fidelity and quality/resolution. Unfortunately it requires them to be quite bulky and in their own device to do so.
Imho something that you can physically touch like a mouse, keyboard, joystick, gamepad or similar will always be better. Haptic feedback and muscle memory are important. And I’d want my mind to be able to wander instead of focusing on “thinking” the right commands. Not to speak of how much easier it would be to trigger the wrong command with any type of “mind reading” interface it would be, opposed to pressing the wrong button.
I actually own a low end consumer grade EEG device (“neurosky mindwave” afair) and it seems like its measuring the input as a waveform similar to an audio signal and then uses traditional audio filtering methods to extract the different types of brain waves that are on different places of the frequency spectrum. I don’t know how fast the lowest of those oscillates, but I see this potentially having the same latency issues that any interface based on frequency analysis has. A good analogy probably would be a “midi pickup” for a guitar. To analyze on what frequency a string is vibrating you need to let at least 1 full cycle pass, that introduces latency. And were talking about something a lot more complex here, if you want to recognize complex patterns in brainwaves.
There were plans to create such devices as consumer grade hardware with special games using them for things like “mind controlled jedi powers”. You can buy these things right now:
The fact that we’ve not seen big coverage in mainstream media imho most likely means it’s just not really a viable approach.
