$6 System-On-A-Chip Mimics Human Vision 118
Brian McLaughlin writes "This article in TechWeb describes a Visual Perception Processor (costing $6) that can automatically detect objects and track their movement in real time, according to Buereau d'Etudes Vision (BEV). They claim that a full-blown vision processing system/application could be built for less than $50 that rivals current state-of-the-art $10,000 systems. Sounds pretty cool.
" Heck, with my vision, I could tear my eyeballs out and simply use these, at a fraction of the cost of new glasses.
Insurance Applications (Score:2)
Chips -> AIBO -> Damn. (Score:1)
ICQ: 49636524
snowphoton@mindspring.com
You might want to check the resolution first (Score:1)
Hrm... I don't know, but for some reason that just dosn't sound like a good idea to me...
[ c h a d o k e r e ] [dhs.org]
Good bye privacy (Score:3)
Goodbye privacy.
George
The real question here... (Score:2)
B) if so, will a beowulf cluster of these things make bugs infinitely shallow?
Can't sleep, clown will eat me (Score:1)
I'll believe it when I see it... (Score:2)
Seriously, though, this has some seriously cool implications if it actually works. It reminds me of a story posted a while back on Slashdot, about a blind man who'd had prototype cranial vision implants back in the 70's. He's currently got some semblance of vision (truly achromatic, poor resolution, and about the size of a 3x5 card held at arm's length, but vision nonetheless). It's had some upgrades over the years, but it's still ancient technology by modern standards. What would happen if they could somehow retrofit that implant with one of these, assuming it worked? While I doubt it'd be anything near human vision, it'd certainly be better (both in terms of vision quality and, probably, physical bulk) as the system he has now.
It'd certainly be an interesting one to try.
As long as it doesn't run windows (Score:4)
Blue screen of death suddenly
I crash into tree
Implications? (Score:3)
If this chip is really as capable as it's made out to be, it will mean a great deal to people who are primarily interested in autonomous mobile robots, as opposed to computer vision.
I could imagine hooking something like this up to a pioneer [activrobots.com] and solving a bunch of problems.
Sort of makes me wish I were still a student, with the time and resources to play with robots...
Improved vision? (Score:1)
Now, you might think that's a joke, but Log Trucks are a SERIOUS problem. Once one has its mind to get you, get you it will. They are VERY ruthless, and will stop at nothing to leap out of the woods when you're not looking and have thier way with you. But don't take my word for it, read the archives at the alt.fear.logtrucks newsgroup.
At any rate, I fell onto a rake after I walked into the truck. Poked out both of my eyes. But on the slightly less bleak side, at least I didn't cry (I couldn't; I had no eyes, or tear ducts. Rakes suck). Anyway, once I got a hold of myself, I asked a passing mime to direct me to the nearest hospital, and I hooked up with a vision unit that cost me $15,874.97 plus tax. To be fair, that DID include the surgery, so I don't think it was that bad of a deal.
Anyway, the vision isn't really that great. I mean, what I see is clear, and I have a nifty zoom option. However, I have lost the ability to see clothing. EVERYONE is naked. Oh, yeah, make your perverted little jokes. And yeah, it was neat at first, but let me tell you, you watch ONE episode of the Jerry Springer show and you'll change your tune REAL quick. Let alone going to grocery stores. I don't even want to THINK about going to a thrift store now.
Which brings up another issue: wearing clothes. I can feel them, so I know when I am. And just because I look naked to me, doesn't mean I want to look naked to everyone else. However, because I can't see what I'm putting on, I end up with some pretty strange outfits. I can't really tell if I'm wearing a three piece suit or a "Hello Kitty" sundress. The only indication I get is the trail of giggles. Do I look THAT weird in a suit?!?!! I guess so.
Anyway, I hope whoever is developing this system has read my story, and makes sure this bug does not persist. Oh, and will someone tell me where the next Linux convention is so I can steer right the fuck clear of it
Re:Chips -> AIBO -> Damn. (Score:1)
Driving gets easier (Score:1)
Contact Lenses for Steve Austin? (Score:2)
This is possible? I guess it would work on the Fat Albert & the gang, but the Minister of Silly Walks would fool this thing faster than your machine can go "bing"!
why would you want to do that? (Score:1)
[ c h a d o k e r e ] [dhs.org]
Re:Implications? (Score:1)
-
Re:Insurance Applications (Score:2)
expensive. If getting a processor like this is cheaper than LASIK and cheaper than conventional glasses -- what's the future of vision plans? At what point do they spring for the implants/glasses/lasers to fix you up? Of course, with all
the genome stuff going on, maybe they'll make you fix it before the child is even born.
What about the already living? I think that one of the major stumbling blocks for better lives is that there are already people who were born before all this little stuff is going on. I really would like to have the ability to alter my life for the better. The question is does this actually work in say a lab rat or a human? Maybe take a blind person who has really nothing to loose and put one of these in and see if it works.
You guys are all missing the point (Score:5)
The brain-eye system uses layers of parallel-processing neurons that pass the signal through a series of preprocessing steps, resulting in real-time tracking of multiple moving objects within a visual scene.
Get it now? So please guys, don't get any *SMART* ideas and jab your eyes out so you can buy a nice new $6 dollar replacement. (I know no one was actually serious about that, but you guys did still miss the point. Its not the camera thats important, and it would do no good to put xray or a zoom lense on there because you're not looking for the output of what its seeing. Its a TRACKING device. So its not used for monitoring either... geez.) \rant
Re:Implications? (Score:1)
Most likely some people will. But they'll probably suck. Robotics SOTA historically advances *very* slowly (it's HARD!).
Sounds dodgy to me... (Score:4)
The GVPP's major performance strength over current $10,000 vision systems is its automatic adaptation to varying lighting conditions. Today's vision systems dictate uniform, shadowless illumination, and even next-generation prototype systems, designed to work under "normal" lighting conditions, can be used only from dawn to dusk. The GVPP, on the other hand, adapts to real-time changes in lighting without recalibration, day or night.
Okay, so what they're claiming is that their brand-new, $6 ($50 in total) device can do things which long-standing scientific projects costing $10,000 cannot? Am I the only one who thinks that this sounds somewhat fishy?
The GVPP was invented in 1992, when BEV founder Patric Pirim saw it would be relatively simple for a CMOS chip to implement in hardware the separate contributions of temporal and spatial processing in the brain.
Again don't you think that all of the many computer scientists and neuropsychologists working on machine vision wouldn't have thought of this themselves? I've read a fair bit on the theory of vision processing and pattern recognition and it's a hugely complex subject. And now a small research company has cracked it? I don't think so. If you read the list of things which they say it can be used for it comes across as being a huge gimmick - they seem to have listed everything they could think of that might be worth money.
It'll be totally free - sort of (Score:1)
All you need is one extra chip to hold the banner ads.
See ++ (Score:2)
Re:Insurance Applications (Score:1)
there is a little bit of discussion [kuro5hin.org] on kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] already. ...
/joeyo
Re:I'll believe it when I see it... (Score:2)
Hell, it's cheap anough we could all have auto-aim Paint-ball guns, and semi-intelligent autocannon. Look out World, my rocketlauncher is going self-aim!
Back to the real subject.. The poor fellow has no use for these, unless he also wants his visual cortex cut out in the name of Borgification..
Re:Enhancements (Score:1)
Unfortunately if you are emiting x-rays you could damage the living tissue inside your eye or your brain. Also I don't think that all those people would like to be exposed to random ammounts of such particles anyway.
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:1)
robotics (Score:1)
Ah! Sanity! (Score:1)
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:2)
Unfortunately you have to somehow dupe millions of people into putting these things inside their bodies which would be difficult. Couple that with the trillions and trillions of terabytes that would accumuliate from each and every person who had the device and you have a very untenable situation.
Not a replacement for human vision (Score:2)
This system does not see the same way that humans do, nor is there any mention in the article that you could actually get a picture out of one. It's designed to locate movement within its field of vision...nothing more. It doesn't notice, and probably can't 'see', things that do not move.
I wouldn't want to replace my eyes with these things. I'd be able to see the animated banner ads, but not read the rest of a static web page!
Re:why would you want to do that? (Score:2)
The problem is, it doesn't look like there's that much room left in either the panel or the device on his head. If you were to fit many more connections in using the current system, I'd guess you'd have to make the system into a large Vaderesque helmet, with connectors going into all sorts of other places in the head simply for there to be room for all of them. Far better to go for something more compact. You can certainly leverage the interface that's already in his head to start, but the external system's going to have to go if you want to fit many more connectors into his brain. It's a matter of physical size more than anything else.
Re:As long as it doesn't run windows (Score:1)
Throw Nextstep/Litestep/whatever on there with a blood-red theme...instant TerminatorVision(tm). =)
Just as long as the thing doesn't look like a golden hair clip over my eyes, I'll be fine. =)
------
Re:The real question here... (Score:2)
Re:Insurance Applications (Score:1)
If you think that, ether you or the people at kuro5hin.org are dumbasses. Next time, at least read the story before jumping to conclusions.
Ask yourself, why would a device that's 'more like a CCD camera' require a CCD camera or other video source to operate? geez.
What this thing does is mimic the human visual cortex in hardware, it can be used to track and recognize up to 8 objects in real time...
[ c h a d o k e r e ] [dhs.org]
A bloody commercial (Score:3)
They say that The $6 Generic Visual Perception Processor (GVPP) can automatically detect objects and track their movement in real-time, according to Bureau d'Etudes Vision (BEV)
This can be easily accomplished by a technique called blob tracking - which is the coarsest image vision technique. A similar project (impressive too) was developed at a japanese company (although I don't remember exactly where). It was some sort of interactive game where a pet was playing with you in a projected image. You moved, played with it and it seemed to understant if you touched him,petted him etc. The catch was that the camera was filled with cameras and they detected the movement of your hands. Given the speed, direction etc. they could actually appreciate what you were supposed to do.
Cute, but nothing interesting from a research point of view.
I assume that they are doing the same. It is very easy to identify the movements in an image (you can do it in real time even on a Pentium). Check any image vision book for details.
Probably they built some chip that works at the speed of a controller (i.e. very fast) but, as any controller performs very few operations.
Still they don't say anything about actual image understanding.
And this is where comes the commercial part. Because they actually are not saying their chip can understand an image. They simply can track motion. That system wouldn't have a clue whether that movement is a fighter or a flying orange.
It may be useful in a computer that is used in a vision lab, but we're quite far from industrial pattern recognition or image understanding.
So please don't take commercial ads as truth
If you are French please don't read what will follow.
After all, they are French, and they are the best sellers in the world. Every one believes that French wines are great and French women are beautiful. Have you ever tasted those sour poisons ? Or ever went to France to watch their women ?
Prices slashed! (Score:2)
Just did a quick search, and found out that GVPP isn't exactly new (the article mentions that it was invented in 1992):
http://www.techweb.com/wire/news/1997/09/0913visio n.html [techweb.com]
Seems the price has gone down "a bit" since '97 though:
The modules measure 40 mm2, have 100 pins, and can handle 20-MHz video signals. The chip is priced at $960. On a card with a socketed GVPP and 64 kilobytes of Flash RAM, the price comes to $1,500.
$6 sounds much better to me :)
This is what I need. :) (Score:2)
The technology isn't good enough for full vision replacement yet but it's only going to improve. What I'd like is 'augmentation' applications:
- 360deg vision
- microscope extension that can be
put into a machine and get a good
view of the motherboard or components
- direct output from a video game or computer
*heh*
Sign me up.
--Ruhk
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:2)
[ c h a d o k e r e ] [dhs.org]
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:1)
You are thinking in the right direction, but this particular piece of hardware just detects movement and tracks moving objects very cheaply. That's not such a big deal for human surveillance. What you should REALLY be worried about is automated face recognition that feeds into big-ass backend database. Once the street cameras + database system will be able to identify you by your face and track you from camera to camera as you walk the streets, life suddenly becomes much more interesting. In particular, Darth Vader-ish helmets start looking very attractive.
And yes, I fully expect such systems to be operational within the next few years. Of course, they may forget to tell the public about it...
Kaa
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:1)
Not really, All they'll have to do is start mass genetically engineering people to start genetically engineering people to produce these electro/chemical 'eyes' while there still in the womb. They could then connect them to the brain in order to get them to record. The hard part then would be convincing people to take them out... Oh god, maybe they've started already!
[ c h a d o k e r e ] [dhs.org]
Don't take yourself so seriously (Score:1)
You're more or less correct in your analysis of the chips, but come on, lighten up! Part of the fun of reading /. is coming across off-the-wall musings people post.
Try to think out of the box a bit more, some of the most innovative inventions come can come from seemingly stupid ideas - why do you think that nothing is out of bounds in a brainstorming session - ideas spark ideas.
Re:why would you want to do that? (Score:1)
The problem is, it doesn't look like there's that much room left in either the panel or the device on his head.
His implant was bulky because it was old-fashioned. If they were to do the implant now it would be much smaller. The reason the implant was old-fashioned is that they have been testing it for a long time (something like ten years).
This isn't what you think it is... (Score:1)
They aren't talking about doing object detection or segmentation, much less tracking, in a rich optical environment. Doing segmentation and tracking in a sparse and controlled visual environmant might useful in a factory environment, but it is going to be of very little value outside of that realm. That means that this chip is much less than it appears, and, frankly, isn't even all that new. Go look at Carver Mead's work in the early and middle eighties, if you don't believe me; it could do the same thing for the same price. Heck, go look at Eric Schwartz's work in the late eighties; it could do much more...for much less.
Re:why would you want to do that? (Score:1)
Having more neurons in the visual cortex wouldn't help either, because again, the eyes have to send some usuable info to the visual cortex. Nor would adding more supportive glial cells for the visual cortex, or even extra thick mylin sheaths on the neurons in the visual cortex.
patently foolish (Score:1)
Re:Insurance Applications (Score:2)
Why is everybody talking about curing sight defects with these? Nowhere in the article does it mention interfacing these things with humans, despite Hemos' eye gouging joke in the post.
This is basically a revolution in hardware accelerated shape/object recognition. With this you could build cars that automatically avoid accidents, robots that navigate through the world like normal people (seing eye droids?), and security systems that track every person in a building.
Maybe in the future we will be able to link devices directly to the human brain and solve vision problems, but you wouldn't need anything as esoteric as this... you just need the right type of camera to replace an eyeball, not an object recognition chip.
Very clever (Score:1)
I knew I shouldn't have squandered all my moderator points yesterday...
Re:Don't take yourself so seriously (Score:1)
Hey, I'm all for creativity, but this really has nothing to do with human vision. Its kinda deceptive if you didn't fully understand the article because it states that it emulates the human visual process. But that really has nothing to do with helping people see better. All this does is track where things go. What good would that do for a human? Our brain already tracks things well enough. For blind people, its just learning how to see again (or for the first time in alot of cases) with the equipment provided, not to mention actually interfacing well enough with the human brain to stimulate it exactly the same way the visual cortex is stimulated by the eyes. I seriously hope that vision systems for blind people are developed some day, but I think this is a totally unrelated field of study.
Mea Culpa (Score:1)
I misread the techweb article. If anyone is intersted there is another (slightly more technical) article here [eetimes.com]
Re:Sounds dodgy to me... (Score:1)
Okay, so what they're claiming is that their brand-new, $6 ($50 in total) device can do things which long-standing scientific projects costing $10,000 cannot? Am I the only one who thinks that this sounds somewhat fishy?
Apparently they have concentrated on a subset of vision problems. The device detects moving objects during varying lightning conditions, which is quite a feat. But, there is more to a generic vision system than that. For instance, you often want to know what kind of object you are tracking. Is it a ball or a bird?
Fisheye Tracking (Score:1)
Better info..... (Score:1)
Won't this violate DMCA? (Score:1)
This sure sounds like a technogical device that could be used to circumvent access control.
If you live in USA, don't hold your breath waiting for these.
---
Re:A bloody commercial (Score:1)
A 100 proposed applications in 10 industries? I don't know, sounds pretty versatile to me. Of course the chip doesn't do all of that stuff natively, are you insane? But it is the crucial, missing component in an enormous variety of applications, and they're selling a powerful chip they've been developing since the early nineties for $6, and you guys are skeptical because you think they just "stumbled across it"?
Result of years of work (Score:3)
PokeTiara (Score:1)
Never mind the fact that one of these imaging things is in the Pokecrystal on the PokeTiara telling Nintendo whether Pokemon is played more in little groups or big groups. It can even be modified to tell teachers if Pokemon is being played at nap time.
The idea may be crazy, but I'm sure real company executives (the gov't wouldn't try it when it's cheaper to buy the information from the megacorps; especially after the lawsuits) could come up with crazier ideas.
Re:patently foolish (Score:1)
Sigh. I stopped reading after I saw
"...the devices are modelled exactly on the way the human eye works, based on the work of thousands of previous researchers into how all human eyes function. 'It was remarkably easy to implement,' say the inventors, 'once others laid the groundwork.'
It's always a good idea to stop reading when you see things that are not there. This it what the article really said:
AFAIK models by mimicking and models exactly is not the same. To write your interpretation as a citation is really bad manners BTW.
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:1)
Why would this be done? What purpose would it serve?
slightly offtopic:
If you are fearing the Orwellian nightmare, then I think you can relax. 1984 and the like were books written about the Soviet Union, not our world today. There are far too many ways for people to communicate and get information out that simply weren't present in Orwell's day. And that is exactly why we do not have to fear it.
provolt
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:1)
I don't know about you, but I can remember things that happened to me when I was 5 like they just happened yesterday. Granted that humans have a selective memory (mostly subconcious), the human brain would probably be more than enough organic storage to store the information if it were retrieved by a set time limit......just try to keep those HERFs and EMPs away from your head....
I can hear it now "WILL YOU STOP TRYING TO DEGAUSS YOUR BROTHER!!!!"
We wouldn't need this kind of specialized hardware (Score:5)
Furthermore, there are the huge (in terms of transistor count) banks of flip-flops which just sit around most of the time, and the costly layers of cache all working their hardest to maintain the illusion that it is RAM. Meanwhile, software optimizers make sure to access memory sequentially to avoid upsetting this illusion, which would ruin the performance.
You can justify all this nonsense with the argument that software is written for sequential machines with RAM. It's a circular problem. If somebody would just release a cheap massively parallel system, the programmers would learn to use it efficiently.
You can make a complete processor in a few thousand transistors (as this guy [ultratechnology.com] has done, though he goes a bit off the deep end...), and you can add a bit (a few K) of high-speed RAM and network them easily enough to make a (dare I say it?) Beowulf cluster on a chip. Each might only run at one tenth the speed of a modern CPU, but you could have hundreds of them for the same cost, giving you bips and gflops for the price of mips.
It would also make the whole design process a lot easier and faster. One simple processor, repeated hundreds or thousands of times. Every advance in production would bring a direct and proportional improvement in performace, with a tiny added design cost. Forget special graphics or sound processors, just plug in more processor banks like you would add memory today and watch your system fly.
C'mon hardware guys, we software guys aren't that stupid! We don't need your illusion of a 386!
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:1)
It sounds like your Orwellian nightmare could be just a few years away. Just this morning, Public Radio International's [pri.org] Marketplace [marketplace.org] described a prototype face-recognition system made by TRW and designed for use in cars to allow only "authorized users" to start the engine.
It doesn't take much of a leap to imagine this system being used for surveillance -- the NSA must be wetting themselves over this.
Re:I'll believe it when I see it... (Score:1)
Military standards, you gotta think if they
tell us about having a plan that has a radar
cross section the size of a bird, they can most
likely track a marble size object at a couple
hunderd or thousand miles.
So just being able to sense movement at shitty
resolution, and distance wouldn't be that attractive.
Re:Sounds dodgy to me... (Score:2)
Apparently they have concentrated on a subset of vision problems.
Yes, but the list given at the end lists things like face recognition which is even more tricky than general object recognition. AFAIK even the best systems today have a lot of trouble with faces that are at an angle of even 30 degrees from the viewpoint.
I'm not saying that they don't have a working chip, I'm saying that the article is filled with marketing hype and very little in the way of facts. The reality of the chip's potential is probably nowhere near what the article hints at, even though I'm sure it has a lot of genuine applications.
Re:Sounds dodgy to me... (Score:1)
Re:Sounds dodgy to me... (Score:2)
It reminds me of the story in Hackers by Steven Levy of the kids who made a ping pong playing robotic arm when the AI students thought it was impossible. Sometimes it takes a different approach to realize something isn't as hard (or expensive) as people believe.
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:1)
The Darth Vader helmets will not help. Face recognitition is just a passing phase. The real tracking will be done on your individual particular style of body movements / body language as you walk, move your arms/legs bob your head, etc. Everyone will need to ride around in a motorized wheelchair and keep your body ridged, but then they'll require license numbers on such wheelchairs. You cannot beat the loss of privacy. We're all SOL and screwed.
Visual pathways in the brain (Score:3)
I'm sure they've done some great work but my personal belief is that it's been subject to a marketing department's hype machine. The vision system in a primate is one of the most complex parts of the brain and is still not entirely understood by neuropsychologists.
There are three main pathways from the eye - the magnocellular (connected to the rods mainly and used for brightness and motion detection), the parvocellular (connected to the cones mainly and used for colour determination) and the koniocellular (whose function is less well known). These three pathways feed into the V1 area which acts as a feature detector, then into the V2 area, which detects colour features and movement and then into a variety of different areas including the V3 (shapes), V4 (colour) and V5 (motion and positioning) areas, the parietal lobe, the thalamus and the various inferotemporal and interparietal areas among others still being found.
All of these different areas seem to have some bearing on vision in its entirety, and show just how complex vision is. As such I think that any claim that a company has suddenly perfected a chip which allows complex visual capabilities is suspect until hard facts and experimentation can prove or disprove the claims.
Re:Insurance Applications (Score:1)
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be great for "cars that automatically avoid accidents, robots that navigate through the world like normal people..." too, but I think the concept of restoring sight is much more important (especially to those who aren't lucky enough to be able to see).
Maybe they could get it to interface with the human nervous system and at least supply limited vision to the unsighted. I remember reading an article in Wired a month or so ago about a guy who was putting an implant into his arm that was going to both send and receive impulses to/from the nervous system. He was going to try and record different emotions to a computer and then attempt to play them back to see if it gave him the same feeling.
I'm sure all of this is some time off, but I think it'll be very exciting to see where something like this goes. The fact that it is so cheap is great too. Although, I'm sure once the insurance companies and doctors get a hold of it we'll be paying $20,000 for a $6 implant!
_________________________________________
Wearable add-on (Score:1)
And of course, my favorite, Predator style targeting reticules;-,
This is new? (Score:1)
There is a much better article here [eetimes.com] from September, 11 1997. Does the 1999 article say anything new about this chip?
(There's also a blurb on the media demonstration here [japantimes.co.jp] from the Nov. 17, 1997 Japan Times.)
-ac
Privacy concerns (Score:3)
On the other hand, this could also be the basis for technology that tracks where you go and what you do. Under the auspices of controlling crime, criminals could be "flagged" and watched, traffic policing could be automated, etc. Where it gets scary is in who determines what suspicios behavior is, or who qualifies as needing to be watched, or the fact that you are removing the human element from the decision making process of evaluating a crime.
In the end, both the citizens and the govornment want this kind of pervasive, intelligent, monitoring technology to be ubiquitous. The difference is that citizens want to be able to turn it off.
Re:We wouldn't need this kind of specialized hardw (Score:2)
(Off topic, but...) Oh, the FORTH chip guy. He's wierd, but very competent. He's into things like generating video signals in real time, in software, to avoid needing a video chip. He used to use an interface with only three pushbuttons as input (no keyboard), with which, by suitable manipulation, you could not only operate a menu system, but program in FORTH. It's worth a look just to see how far minimalism can go. It's not all that useful, but if you architect systems, it's worth seeing his approach.
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:1)
Eventually, people will be encased in conical, wheeled vehicles from the moment of birth, for protection reasons.
The mind will eventually rebel against such treatment, causing irrational hatred and fear of non encased humanoids, and desiring to exterminate them.
Particular Dr. types.
George
Re:Sounds dodgy to me... (Score:1)
Absolutely. There are several projects underway (and completed) to do this, and all of them are well into the multi-thousand dollar range, AFAIK. The silicon visual system constructed at, IIRC, Georgia Tech, is supposed to be most complex VLSI device ever created (or was when their page was last updated ;-). I suspect that you won't be buying one for for $50.
(Incidentally, my favorite hardware vision project is here [umd.edu]. This guy building most of a primate visual system (retina to cortex) to model attention and tracking. Who needs a silicon retina when you can get a silicon cortex ;-)
Actually we do (Score:1)
Re:speed up porn viewing.... (Score:1)
No kidding! Look what he's doing now... (Score:2)
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:1)
Re:As long as it doesn't run windows (Score:1)
Mike Roberto
- roberto@apk.net
-- AOL IM: MicroBerto
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:1)
Xray vision (Score:1)
Re:Visual pathways in the brain (Score:1)
Feel free to buy an evaluation kit and see what experimentation shows. They've had them for two years, and there's mention on the net of a 1998 video describing and showing their technology. If you really like the tech, the article says they're auctioning it soon so you can get the whole package...
Re:Chips -> AIBO -> Damn. (Score:1)
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Re:Good bye privacy (Score:1)
Re:patently foolish (Score:2)
I do maintain that it was clever just the same, but I won't hide behind the artist's excuse "if it made you angry, the art was working" because I was hoping to make you laugh. sorry.
more like 20-30 years (Score:1)
[ c h a d o k e r e ] [dhs.org]
Re:why would you want to do that? (Score:1)
[ c h a d o k e r e ] [dhs.org]
Doubt so. (Score:2)
The human visual system uses countless contextual, knowledge based cues to make sense of the world (e.g. take a look at some optical illusions); even a simple task like tracking requires a lot of background knowledge. To claim that their mimics the human visual system is, frankly, unbelievable.
Re:Insurance Applications (Score:1)
I never said "using this technology to try and cure blindness/improve sight is a waste" I said it's NOT APPLICABLE! It's a microchip that takes in a video stream, identifies and tracks programmed objects, and outputs numerical data on their motion. Sure, you could conceivably find a way to feed that information in a comprehensible way directly to the human brain, which I guess would be the equivalent of giving somebody "visual sonar" or something, but if you had the technology to interface directly with the brain like that, you'd just have to feed it video.. you don't need a processor in there spitting out motion data... the brain does that. This new chip mimics the part of the brain that does this, not the actual sight organs.
First steps.... (Score:1)
I believe this is one of the first steps to a world similar to what William Gibson describes in his novels, where humans and technology interface in a whole new way. With these types of advances a whole slew of ethical and privacy issues will develop, as they do with any revolutionary technology, but I believe that in the end the benefits will far outweigh the drawbacks.
Now all that is needed is for some other emerging thechnologies from varied fields such as nerve re-growth, computer miniturization, etc. will combine to produce things like relacement/upgrade body parts.
Personally, I can't wait for the first brain-embedded computers to emerge. I'd be willing to be one of the first human testers of such technology.
Any comments/ideas?
Nice chip (Score:1)
Lets just hope the military or the government don't go and buy it up; if they did, it would disappear from the public domain completely, and forever.
Loss of privacy? (Score:1)
It is already possible to monitor people with hidden cameras. This system could only track someone's movements.
What happens when the target turns around, obscuring his/her face, or whatever part was being tracked? Will it compensate by locking onto a different part of the object/person? What happens if the target becomes obscured?
I guess it could be used to follow someone walking down an empty street.
The article makes this system sound very capable, but it would be desirable for it to be able to compensate for the above problems (I doubt it would be able to deal with all of those mentioned) for it to be useful to follow someone automatically, anywhere they go.
So... bunch o these things make a dandy ABM? (Score:1)
Re:Enhancements (Score:1)
Auction Under Way (Score:1)