Facebook drops funding for interface that reads the brain
The spring of 2017 may be remembered as the coming-out party for Big Tech’s campaign to get inside your head. That was when news broke of Elon Musk’s new brain-interface company, Neuralink, which is working on how to stitch thousands of electrodes into people’s brains. Days later, Facebook joined the quest when it announced that its secretive skunkworks, named Building 8, was attempting to build a headset or headband that would allow people to send text messages by thinking—tapping them out at 100 words per minute.
The company’s goal was a hands-free interface anyone could use in virtual reality. “What if you could type directly from your brain?” asked Regina Dugan, a former DARPA officer who was then head of the Building 8 hardware dvision. “It sounds impossible, but it’s closer than you realize.”
Now the answer is in—and it’s not close at all. Four years after announcing a “crazy amazing” project to build a “silent speech” interface using optical technology to read thoughts, Facebook is shelving the project, saying consumer brain-reading still remains very far off.
