This is some pretty disturbing stuff if you ask me.

why's it disturbing to you?
as long as the girls are cute, i am okay with this.
Technically, it shows some higher brain activity at least . .

What's next? Some Elcor style speech patterns?

Mournful Lament: A technology to determine mood from brainwaves and we make cat ears out of it.

R&D takes money, which means you need a marketable item. Say what you will, lots of furries out there with too much disposable income.

EDIT: Would you rather Emotitoys?

People are also working on brainwave-directed cars with some success, but it's a lot easier to make marketable cat ears than a rigger control that meets safety standards.

Why is it disturbing? Sure it may not be your cup of tea, but to others, it's pretty darn cool.

Also, like CanRay said, R&D takes money and these can offset that cost by using the tech and making products NOW, rather than sitting on the tech until you have a "real" product to go to the market.

Guys, it is a prove of concept.

Japan is a great place. This is the first step to a brighter future.

So. In the three years since I was in college and another senior project from my classmates was a game that used "brain reading" technology that had oodles of inputs (63 separate variables) we still only know one factor?

Every brain-interface device like this uses a generic "concentration" meter. And its been like this for five years. Seriously, wth.

Did that project work for multiple people? I would think variances would make it only work as intended for a select few.

There's a training portion where the program and the player "get to know each other" as it were.

Basically, it takes a base-line reading, then asks you to concentrate and relax a few times.

It worked for just about everyone (not that I ever got to test it). They'd even try and confuse it by having the baseline high.

I will admit that the sensor structure has gotten smaller. But really, we should be focusing on determining what the other 60 some signals are.

It's not really like that though. It just measures how much action is going on in your brain, not what you are actually think.

I saw a toy that used this tech a few months ago. You used your mind to levitate a ball through hoops.

Someday I'll have my many flying guns around me controlled by my murder-thoughts.

It's kinda sad, but I don't think I would be able to use those cat ears. At least they would look spastic since I only concentrate in short bursts of less than a second.

This would actually be an accurate represantation of what they'll probably look like on most people.
Given what i've seen so far about trode net operated vehicles (which seem to use a much more intricate interface), you have to focus about 5-6 seconds for a simple "turn left" or "turn right" command.
I could see these cat ears requiring at least equal amounts of concentration.
I wonder how much training (and how many takes while filming) it took that nekomimi in the linked video to pull off her performance like that.
I mean, it looked really natural and cat-like and not forced at all.
That must take some effort with present technology.

Also makes me wonder again why RC didn't include an Exotic Ears qualitiy.

I imagine it will always take some effort to control objects with mental impulses, especially those that don't use pre-existing motor skills(like replacement limbs), but within 50 years that technology will be so common everyone will be trained in it maybe before they can walk.

Read this and immediately thought of Angelic Layer.

Let's not be silly: they don't look at all natural. They look like a Furby. Cheap nylon, jerky, random. In fact, the smart way to build these would be a simple random movement program, and rely on the stupidity of humans to attribute intent and meaning to the movements. For years (and up to today?), people attributed intelligence to the 100% random shuffle feature of their iPods, saying that it was matching their mood or sequencing songs that went together, and so on. (No, not the 'play higher-rated songs more often' feature.)

Yeah, and look at how frightened the Pentagon was of Furbies!

I didn't say these things weren't frightening.

Ugh. Just looking at that Angelic Layer page makes me think of Battle Athletes Victory. I can even see it ending in alternative love interest.

Knowing Mac products, it's sensible to think that.
Knowing Mac users it's sensible to expect them to think that. (Zing!)

So what happens if you plunk one of these on an actual cat?




-k

Humans are pattern seeking animals. It is bred into us at the genetic level. Without it how would we ever get to see penises in Disney movies,

Psh. iPods aren't (well, weren't) Macs.

I agree, Halflife. That's why my version is cheaper and better.

Singularity. Inversion of thought and reality. Wacko tea maniacs, and timepieces melting over foliage. You know the drill.

Or the same thing that happens when you put a piece of buttered bread on the back of a cat.

*dang. I always forget that whitespace gets removed, so ascii art doesn't post well.

Suffice to say it was an expression of horror.

Don't know, really. Baseline reaction? Somehow uncanny valley related, perhaps?

It's not to say I don't like the concept. It's pretty awesome, and definitely a way to open up funding for this kind of tech.

And yeah, there's a demo video of the thing in action on random people, where it acts, well, random.
No way anyone's ever going to get this stuff to work properly without those baseline readings or extensive training.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TZDkICB6iU