Facebook Aims to Connect Directly to Your Brain
April 19 2017 - 7:27PM
Dow Jones News
By Deepa Seetharaman
Facebook Inc. wants to read your mind.
"What if you could type directly from your brain?" asked Regina
Dugan, who runs Facebook's secretive hardware division, Building 8,
during a keynote address at the company's F8 developer conference
Wednesday.
Building 8, which was created at last year's F8, has been
working on a "brain-computer interface" for several months, Ms.
Dugan said. Recent job postings for Building 8 show the unit is
hiring engineers for a two-year project "focused on developing
advanced (brain-computer interface) technologies."
Ultimately, the mind-reading technology could help people type
100 words a minute from their minds -- about five times faster than
we type from our smartphones, Ms. Dugan told developers at the
conference in San Jose, Calif.
Separately, Building 8 also is working on technology that could
help people "hear" with their skin, Ms. Dugan said.
Building 8 tackles Facebook's bleeding edge ideas -- way beyond
projects such as the augmented reality technology CEO Mark
Zuckerberg announced Tuesday.
Facebook hired Ms. Dugan from Alphabet Inc.'s Google last year
with a mandate to develop what she called " audacious science."
Billionaire executive Elon Musk has launched a competing
project, Neuralink Corp., with the aspiration to upload and
download thoughts through implanted tiny brain electrodes.
Ms. Dugan told the crowd that this wasn't about decoding
people's random thoughts, which she said Facebook doesn't have the
right to know. Instead, Facebook hopes only to interpret and send
the thoughts people would speak aloud anyway, Ms. Dugan said.
"You take many photos, you choose to share some of them," she
said during her keynote. "Similarly you have many thoughts, you
choose to share some of them."
The technology could help disabled people, Ms. Dugan said,
showing a video of a woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also
known as Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS, who is able to slowly type
with her brain through a project at Stanford University. It also
could have more broad uses, such as allowing people to respond to
texts or emails without looking at their phones.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 19, 2017 19:12 ET (23:12 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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