The days of attacking aliens with a joystick could soon be over, thanks to a breakthrough technique where a teenager played "Space Invaders" using only signals from his brain.
With a technique that takes data from the surface of the brain, a 14-year-old boy from St. Louis was able to play the two-dimensional Atari game without so much as lifting a finger.
In "Space Invaders," a popular video game from the 1970s, players control a movable laser cannon in attempts to shoot rows of aliens that move back and forth across the screen.
The objective is to kill the aliens before they have a chance to get to the bottom of the screen. Once they land, the game ends.
The aliens can also shoot at the cannon, so the player has to try to evade the shots.
The boy, who already had had neural-sensor grids implanted to monitor his brain for epilepsy, was connected to a computer program that linked the video game to the grids.
He was then asked to move his hands, talk and imagine things. The researchers correlated these movements to the different signals fired by his brain.
They then asked the boy to play "Space Invaders" by moving his hand and tongue — and then to imagine those movements without actually performing them.
"He cleared out the whole Level One, basically on brain control," said Eric Leuthardt, a researcher at the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. "He learned almost instantaneously. We then gave him a more challenging version in two dimensions, and he mastered two levels there playing only with his imagination."
No comments:
Post a Comment