Forget “OK Glass,” MindRDR Is A Google Glass App You Control With Your Thoughts
Forget
“OK Glass,” MindRDR Is A Google Glass App You Control With Your Thoughts
Google Glass has made a
name for itself (somewhat infamously) as head-mounted hardware
that you can control with your voice and a sliding finger. Now, a
team based out of interactive studio This Place in London, is launching a new app
that it hopes will kickstart an even more seamless way of interacting with the
device: with the power of your mind.
MindRDR, as the app is called, links up
Google Glass with another piece of head-mounted hardware, the Neurosky EEG biosensor, to create a
communication loop.
The
Neurosky biosensor picks up on brainwaves that correlate to your ability to
focus. The app then translates these brainwaves into a meter reading that
gets superimposed on the camera view in Google Glass. As you “focus” more with
your mind, the meter goes up, and the app takes a photograph of what you
are seeing in front of you. Focus some more, and the meter goes up again and
the photo gets posted to Twitter. Like this:
It’s an early, and somewhat
primitive vision of how your mind can control Glass.
Yes,
there are devices out there that have even more sensors on them, although that
can start to get very expensive (the Neurosky retails for £71 in the UK, while
Google Glass costs £1,000 and the app is free).
And
to be honest, the current hook-up is pretty primitive, too. When I arrived for
a demonstration earlier today, one of This Place’s account managers was cooling
Glass down under the air conditioner.
And
that’s before you start to put on two different bits of headgear. It can
be a little clumsy.
But
all this isn’t the point: The idea here is that this is a minimum viable
product, a first step that can be developed further — for example, to create
applications to “train” people to concentrate better, or to play games, maybe
to help suggest places to get a coffee when your sensor picks up that
you’re tired, or for medical applications, for example for people with mobility
problems.
And
potentially, you could build out the basic concept with more, lighter and
easier-to-use sensors. This Place says that among those who have taken an
interest are Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist who is nearly paralysed
because of a progressive motor neuron disease.
To
that end, while This Place continues its own development, it has also put the code up on GitHub for others to
use it and expand on it, as well.
Visiting
This Place earlier today for a demonstration, Chloe Kirton, This Place’s
creative director who had originally conceived of MindRDR, told me that the
idea is somewhat related to the kind of work her colleagues do every day for
paying clients.
(MindRDR,
to be clear, is not a paid project and was not developed for any client; rather
it’s in the vein of other London-based creative agencies like UsTwo, where
employees are encouraged to work on creative projects that are completely
outside of their day-to-day client work.)
A
typical project for This Place, she says, is working on user experience and
user interfaces for large Internet properties. “When touchscreens first became
mainstream it forced the tech industry to really rethink the user experience,” she
says. “Could this become the basis of a new kind of user interface? Could
the future be about an interface that disappears altogether?”
Part
of the interest, too, came out of Kirton’s awareness of some of Google Glass’s
shortcomings.
“We
saw the problems,” she says. Speaking out loud to your device is unnatural and
could be downright awkward in some cases. And the finger sliding and tapping is
not great, either. “After a while your arm gets tired,” she says. “You get
Glass elbow. We wanted to think of something that was natural and accessible
for everyone.”
Google
Glass, for all the glasshole drawbacks,
has become a reference point that has inspired some interesting applications
and concepts for where wearable technology may take us in the future. That’s
included ways to use
Glass to pay for things, and how Glass can be used by doctors and
other clinicians. Kirton says that MindRDR is so far the only app
that links up Google Glass with brainwave-reading technology.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/09/forget-ok-glass-mindrdr-is-a-new-google-glass-app-that-you-control-with-your-thoughts/
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