Researchers at MIT Media Lab have developed a creepy device that is able to secretly have conversations with the voices inside your head.
The AlterEgo device enables users to “silently converse” with it, just by thinking. The device can also talk directly back to the user.
Dezeen.com reports: It uses electrodes to pick up neuromuscular signals in the user’s jaw and face that are triggered by internal verbalisations.
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These signals are then sent to a machine-learning system that has been trained to associate certain signals with certain words.
A pair of bone-conduction headphones included in the device transmits vibrations through the bones of the face to the inner ear. As the headphones don’t obstruct the ear canal, this means the system can pass on information to the user without interrupting a conversation or interfering with the user’s aural experience.
By vocalising internally, the user can communicate with other devices, the internet, AI assistants or applications to receive certain information, or make commands.
The developers hope that this will fuse these digital interfaces into human personalities as a “second self.”
By vocalising internally, the user can communicate with other devices, the internet, AI assistants or applications to receive certain information, or make commands.
The developers hope that this will fuse these digital interfaces into human personalities as a “second self.”
“If I want to look something up that’s relevant to a conversation I’m having, I have to find my phone and type in the passcode and open an app and type in some search keyword, and the whole thing requires that I completely shift attention from my environment and the people that I’m with to the phone itself,” she continued.
For this reason, Maes and her students experimented with new technologies to develop something that would allow people to benefit from the information offered by these devices, but in a way that allows them to “remain in the present.”
AlterEgo is the latest concept to come out of MIT Media Lab – an interdisciplinary research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1985.
Some of the centre’s more recent projects include a range of “living jewellery” that roams across the body as a tiny personal assistant and a tattoo ink that changes colouraccording to varying glucose and pH levels inside the body.
