Controlling VR with Your Mind

Boston-based startup Neurable is focused on deciphering brain activity to determine a person’s intention, particularly in virtual and augmented reality. The company uses dry electrodes to record brain activity via electroencephalography (EEG), then software analyzes the signal and determines the action that should occur. Neurable, which raised $2 million in venture funding late last year, is still in the early stages: its demo hardware looks like a bunch of electrodes attached to straps that span a user’s head, worn along with an HTC Vive virtual-reality headset. Unlike the headset, Neurable’s contraption is wireless—it sends data to a computer via Bluetooth. The startup expects to offer software tools for game development later this year, and it isn’t planning to build its own hardware; rather, Neurable hopes companies will be making headsets with sensors to support its technology in the next several years.

Success may be a long shot. No method of interaction has come close to supplanting the physical devices we typically use to control digital experiences—handheld controllers, mouse, keyboard, touch screen. And brain-computer interfaces in particular can be clunky, slow, and prone to errors. But virtual and augmented reality are still in such early stages that the ways we use them aren’t yet entrenched, and they’re vastly different from other technologies. In an early demo of a VR game, actions—such as picking an item of food off a table and throwing it at a goblin—are controlled by analyzing brain activity to decipher intent. And while it’s nothing new to track brain activity via EEG and look for a particular signal that occurs when a user is trying to select something, the company says it has figured out how to reduce noise and use the signals more quickly than has been done in the past.

More information:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603896/controlling-vr-with-your-mind/

Robots Are Creating Their Own Language

A new experiment conducted by an artificial intelligence lab has proved successful in getting robots to lay the groundwork for creating their very own language. Experts at Open AI, the artificial intelligence lab, designed a two-dimensional big, white square where robots had to learn how to communicate with each other in order to accomplish menial tasks. The robots, which were green, red and blue circles, had to do things like moving themselves, or telling each other to move, from point A to point B. If they wanted to be successful, they had to talk to each other.

They used reinforcement learning, according to the group. This trial-and-error technique had the robots trying out a bunch of different sounds to figure out what worked and what didn’t. And just as human language evolved through words, sounds and gestures, Wired.com writes that robots will eventually be able communicate their ideas using sentences. Open AI’s next project is developing a robot-to-English translator, so hopefully we’ll get a heads-up when the robots start talking about how they plan to take over the world.

More information:

http://nypost.com/2017/03/17/robots-are-creating-their-own-language/

We Sleep to Forget

Over the years, scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep. Some have argued that it’s a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain’s cellular waste. Still others have proposed that sleep simply forces animals to lie still, letting them hide from predators. A pair of papers published on Thursday in the journal Science offer evidence for another notion: We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day.

In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks. In 2003, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during the day that our brain circuits got noisy. When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise.

More information:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/science/sleep-memory-brain-forgetting.html?smid=fb-nytscience&smtyp=cur&_r=0

Boston Dynamics 'Handle' Robot

Boston Dynamics' latest robot is called Handle and unlike its previous robots that ran, jumped or walked, this two-legged monstrosity gets around on small wheels. Even with the adjustment, the video shows clearly how it can still get down stairs, navigate down a snowy hill, and pull off impressive leaps even while moving.

The company says it's designed to carry things. Handle is 6.5 feet tall, can jump 4 feet and travels at speeds of up to 9mph. According to the description on the video, it combines hydraulic and electric actuators, and can travel up to 15 miles between charges and it's apparently less complex than the quadruped and bipedal robots.

More information:

https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/27/boston-dynamics-officially-reveals-its-rolling-handle-robot/

Robots Made with Human Flesh

Two University of Oxford biomedical researchers are calling for robots to be built with real human tissue, and they say the technology is there if we only choose to develop it. Right now, tissue engineering relies on bioreactors to grow sheets of cells. These machines often look like large fish tanks, filled with a rich soup of nutrients and chemicals that cells need to grow on a specialized trellis. The problem, is that bioreactors currently fail to mimic the real mechanical environment for cells. In other words, human cells in muscles and tendons grow while being stretched and moved around on our skeletons. Without experiencing these natural stresses, the tissue grafts produced by researchers often have a broad range of structural problems and low cell counts. That's where robots come in. The researchers propose a humanoid-bioreactor system with structures, dimensions, and mechanics similar to those of the human body.

As the robot interacted with its environment, tissues growing on its body would receive the typical strains and twists that they would if they grew on an actual human. The result would be healthy tissue, grown for the exact area on the body it was destined to replace. Researchers note that this would be especially helpful for bone-tendon-muscle grafts, because failure during healing often occurs at the interface between tissues. What would this humanoid-bioreactor system look like? It could possibly be built on top of a humanoid robot with soft robotics muscles made from electroactive polymers, and the growing muscles could piggyback on those to get their exercise. It would also need to be covered in soft, stretchable sensors to monitor the health of the growing tissues. The result might look a bit like the University of Tokyo's Kenshiro robot, whose actuators make realistically human movements.

More information:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/get-ready-for-robots-made-with-human-flesh/