Northrop Grumman To Develop Brain-Wave Binoculars 149
An anonymous reader writes "An AP wire reports that DARPA has granted a $6.7 million contract to Northrop Grumman to develop 'brainwave binoculars'. The binoculars will be built into a helmet, which will include EEG electrodes that will monitor the wearer's brain activity for patterns consistent with object identification/recognition. From what I can gather, the idea is that when you look at a far-off or partially obscured object without noticing it, your subconscious probably did notice it and tried, unsuccessfully, to identify it. The EEG in these binoculars would pick up on that kind of subconscious activity and draw the wearer's attention to the object in question. The goal is that these binoculars would be able to pick up on any object anywhere in the wearer's field of view, where a person can only pick up on things that he focuses both his eyes and his attention on. This delves into some very interesting territory: it would be an electronic device that uses human eyes to collect data, and even uses a human brain to partially process the data. Since it also passes its results back to the human providing the data and initial processing, it essentially adds a second processing loop in parallel to the wearer's visual system."
waste of taxpayer dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
If this makes it past vaporware, I'll dance a jig.
false positives? (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember reading about the research behind that; that the "subconscious" detected things quicker than the conscious human. But if I could find it again, I'd like to see the details of the testing.
My guess is that the time between subconsciously and consciously recognizing something is used for verifications. So you get quicker results in the case where the image is, in fact, what you are asked to recognise, but you'd get false positives in the other cases.
I mean, recognizing threats is pretty important, evolution-wise. Since this device just takes existing data from the brain and feeds it back in, it's hard to believe it would be of any help, or we would have evolved the same thing.
Re:false positives? (Score:5, Insightful)
Our brains are incredibly good at parallel pattern matching. We can see patterns - real or spurious - in almost anything. But those thousands of parallel pattern matching units have to be funneled through a single consciousness to be useful. If a computer can sort through the synapses, find the ones that are looking to match "man with RPG in the distance", and figure out when they fire, it can perhaps bring something up on the display faster than the person can. Computers, after all, can process a small number of things faster than we can. They just can't process as many complex things in parallel.
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I seem to remember seeing research that showed that there is object and movement detection that goes on before conscious 'seeing'.
It will be interesting to see if they get anywhere with the machine recognition.
X-ray glasses (Score:4, Funny)
As a kid, I sent in my money for the x-ray glasses on the back of the comic in my bubble gum. What a rip-off. Maybe I'll finally get a pair that work.
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If a computer can sort through the synapses, find the ones that are looking to match "man with RPG in the distance", and figure out when they fire, it can perhaps bring something up on the display faster than the person can. Computers, after all, can process a small number of things faster than we can. They just can't process as many complex things in parallel.
No such device will be able to 'sort through the synapses' - it won't have that kind of access. At best it can detect that something was noticed. Furthermore, given a detection, the human is (in my opinion) still much better at recognizing what it is, even subconciously. Although computers do process certain types of problems faster and better than humans, that does not include this type of pattern matching, even for a single shape.
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That's a good point, but don't you think there are reasons that make it practical for our conscious efforts to be focused on one problem/issue at a time? Apart from the fact that our sentience dictates much of how we process data (e.g we recall something from our memory that looks similar..etc), our sentience also "learns" to prioritize the objects on which to focus. If you're driving at high speed at a critical point and something catches your eye only slightly and you ignore it, it may be good that you do
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Well, we're talking about binoculars, I'd assume you wouldn't be using them when you aren't trying to find something in the distance.
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The question I have here is why don't they just attach a helmet mounted camera (or two) to a computer that can identify people and just paint them in a HUD the soldier is wearing.
The camera's could be infrared too so they could 'see' much more easily and in the dark.
Also, if the soldier was connected to some sort of network to command and control they would give them better situational awareness and they could feed friend/foe identification to all soldiers on the battlefield.
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You "see" much more than you perceive (Score:2)
This calls to mind an exchange between Dirk Gently and Richard MacDuff in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency":
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Some people might see more, but I bet most other people don't see much and they make most of it up when you ask them based on what they think they saw (which can be influenced by what you tell them).
Re:waste of taxpayer dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably said at the onset of most of the DARPA projects, most breakthrough technologies in all fields of science really, that's kind of the point.
Re:waste of taxpayer dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
If this makes it past vaporware, I'll dance a jig.
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That said, it seems one of the best ways to get a technology developed is to figure out how to kill people with it.
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Northrop Grumman built the lunar lander and the B-2 Stealth Bomber...as well as countless other fixed-wing aircraft (manned and unmanned).
They build the world's most advanced aircraft carriers and attack submarines. They have divisions that build systems from the mundane to the insane. Example - the division in Reston, Virginia has been selling large-scale (up to 84") touchtable computer systems FOR YEARS...not IN years. They build any number of other cutting-edge sensor systems, high-energy defensive la
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Yet their touch table technology isn't owned by them, its a subcontractor. Look up Applied Minds or something, I forget the exact contractor.
Northrop Grumman and all of the large scale defense contractors are moving away from basic R&D into buying small contractors and integration of subcontractor developed technology. To them, there is no money to be had in the 200-500k research, they want multi-year, multi-million dollar contracts. That's why you hear something like this, and its not NOC developing th
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Re:waste of taxpayer dollars (Score:4, Funny)
Really..
If they do get it working it would be like this..
Subconscious: *LOOK* LOOK LOOK LOOK! look at the big .. blue thing .., I don't know what that is! look!
Conscious: uhh.. that's a mountain..
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Sounds Just Like ... (Score:5, Funny)
... those x-ray glasses they used to sell in the backs of comic books.
What do you want to bet that the only thing these binoculars register is 'tits'.
Re:Sounds Just Like ... (Score:5, Funny)
What do you want to bet that the only thing these binoculars register is 'tits'.
And how would that be a waste of money?
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> You must be new here.
New anywhere, I'd say. ...or a woman..
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In some cases it will certainly get rid of "don't ask don't tell".
"Why does Henry's Binoculars keep registering other soldier's asses?"
I'm sure there's a movie about it (Score:2)
I'm sure I've seen some movie [wikipedia.org] about that...
Necromunger scope? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does this remind anyone of the Necromunger Scope beings from Chronicles of Riddick?
Future press release. (Score:5, Funny)
Servicemen reprimanded for zooming in on young women's breasts. One of the servicemen was quoted as saying, "It's the damn sub-conscious link! I can't do anything about it!" Defense department reevaluating binoculars.
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However if you you think you are at risk of being shot at, your mind takes a different priority. Sex is usually at #2 after imeadeate survival.
Re:Future press release. (Score:5, Funny)
However if you you think you are at risk of being shot at, your mind takes a different priority. Sex is usually at #2 after imeadeate survival.
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Unless you're in THIS [wikimedia.org] situation...
...and thanks for the mammaries! ;)
Re:Future press release. (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, 9 of them zoomed in on the woman's breast, but why is this 10th one looking at the guy beside her?
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Re:Future press release. (Score:4, Funny)
New defense tactic: send out naked, beautiful women. Shoot the Americans while they can't see anything else.
Re:Future press release. (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh i'm not sure if this is such a good idea - (Score:2)
Alternative use: (Score:5, Interesting)
Interrogator: "Do you recognize these photos of bomb making materials?"
Suspect: "No, no I don't."
Interrogator: "Liar! Our brain wave scanner says you do! Off to the waterboard with you!"
Already exists: (Score:3, Informative)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D05E0DE143CF93AA35751C1A9679C8B63 [nytimes.com]
The only question is whether they're using it. They probably are:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/158464_brain29.html [nwsource.com]
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"Interrogator: "Liar! Our brain wave scanner says you do! Off to the waterboard with you!"
Waterboards are crude (not that applied stress coupled with sophisticated analysis of interrogation results is a bad idea) and the ideal would be to bypass the need to stress subjects at all.
If responses to imagery can be evaluated without stressing the subject, that well get more information. The enemy subjects experience (pain, pleasure, neutral) is a side issue.
I think the question on every ./er's mind is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I think the question on every ./er's mind is... (Score:5, Funny)
So long as you don't try and reformat with ReiserFS -- I hear that's a little dangerous.
Re:I think the question on every ./er's mind is... (Score:4, Funny)
Only to spouses. Only to spouses.
Oh Wow, Man... the Images (Score:5, Insightful)
From reading the short article, it looks like a method to take images the brain filters out as unimportant, and bring them up to the conscious level.
Problem: if you do this, wouldn't this clutter your view with unimportant images, or alternatively cause cognitive confusion? A person with this device attached literally couldn't trust their eyes anymore.
Sounds like Mescaline.
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Your the guy sitting on top of the HumVee. You're job is to continuously scan for suspicious activity. A mind numbingly boring job for the most part.
I would expect this to give the scanner's mind something to do, bringing their attention to much more activity. Most of which will be subsequently ignored, but occassionally it might make all the difference.
YORE (Score:1, Informative)
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There's an old saying, along the lines of "To see something, you must look at it, and then you must see it."
A lot of what you look at you could match / comprehend properly but don't. In many cases, parts of the brain used for the pattern recognition do fire, but the process doesn't complete (due to overload, fatigue, etc).
Having something mechanical flag those for you will help with the final seeing part.
Of course, it has to be tuned right. A lot of the brain's pattern match stuff fires on things which ar
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Agreed: As described this device would seem to bring specific attention to everything in your field of vision you didn't take the time to try to identify.
More useful, in my opinion, would be one of the three other possabilities:
1) Auto zoom/focus on anything you attempt to focus on.
2) Perform its own pattern/image recognition and attempt to highlight things which it deems potentially important (not just everything you see).
3) Create an artifical focus (flat focus) for the field of vision (I suppose this wou
Feedback (Score:1)
Is there not a risk of weird feedback, and the wearer's head eventually exploding like that bloke in "Scanners"?
Sweet (Score:1)
Sounds a little overhyped (Score:4, Insightful)
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Can you imagine.... (Score:2)
Ad block (Score:1)
Would be great if I could install Ad Block onto this thing...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865/ [mozilla.org]
The important questions (Score:1)
2.I am cross eyed! Will it effect its performance ?
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I've got amblyopia. My guess is it would work fine - my brain knows to ignore that eye (I had a lazy eye, and they didn't fix it right til too late), so this thing would know too, right??
In other news (Score:1)
Iomega has applied for a DARPA grant to develop a digital brain interface that will allow the subject to store in his noggin as much as 80 (160, with a doubler) gigabytes of sensitive data.
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Recursion issues abound (Score:5, Funny)
Guy wearing binoculars notices some object
...
Binoculars sense this and draw attention to object by putting some kind of HUD symbol on screen
Guy wearing binoculars notices HUD display object
Binoculars sense this and draw attention to object by putting some kind of HUD symbol on screen
Guy wearing binoculars notices HUD display object
Binoculars sense this and draw attention to object by putting some kind of HUD symbol on screen
Guy wearing binoculars notices HUD display object
Binoculars sense this and draw attention to object by putting some kind of HUD symbol on screen
Binoculars and/or Guy's brain explodes
???
Profit
Re:Recursion issues abound (Score:5, Insightful)
Profit
The issue is that with the current state of DARPA and US military "research", you can put pretty much anything in front of this line (including as many lines of ??? as you want) and it'll still happen.
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Except that DARPA and the US military aren't profit-seeking organizations.
They drink from an essentially boundless well of cash. They have other goals which you may or may not agree with, but profitability is *not* one of them.
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No, but profit certainly *is* the goal of the contractors who lobby Congress to give money to DARPA. DARPA themselves, whatever that means, doesn't care about profit ... but the people at Northrop Grumman certainly do, and they've got a large amount of influence when it comes to allocating money in Washington.
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Everyone points to ARPANET as an example of "see, military R&D does produce useful things!"
I call shenanigans. While I wasn't alive at the time, the concept of having computers talk to each other, and getting those computers to automate the routing of messages, surely would have been developed in the private or academic sector as soon as it was useful to do so. It's not a terribly outlandish concept, after all.
DARPA did it first because they were interested in a particular kind of robustness, not the ef
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My first thought was similar...what about some sort of positive feedback loop? Could be mind blowing.
don't get how it works ?? (Score:2, Insightful)
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I would assume that if you're watching a specific known subject from a distance, you turn this feature off.
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No, they don't. They stay focused on the tank.
Here's a link to NGES's press release (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.es.northropgrumman.com/solutions/hornet/index.html [northropgrumman.com]
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Actually that's the product page. The following is the actual press release:
http://www.es.northropgrumman.com/news/2008/06/144249_Northrop_Grumman-Led_Te.html [northropgrumman.com]
The Company is Formulaic (Score:1)
More (Score:3, Interesting)
garbage to hang on a GI that will distract him, or her, visually, at critical moments and which will run out of battery power at the worst possible times as well.
Remember Heinlein's comment about combat gear - it has to be easy enough for a grunt to use so that someone equipped with something simpler, like, say a rock, who then comes up from behind the soldier using the hardware and bashes his brains in while he's trying to read a vernier.
Too much information? (Score:3, Insightful)
On looking at any scene the human brain must catagorise thousands and thousands of schemas and frameworks while trying to determine objects of interest in that scene. Clearly most of the things the brain identifies are not of value and the schema is not raised to high-level consciousness.
When you step out of your front door every morning, the brain would identify squirrels, grass, hose on the lawn, a car with four tires, a motorcycle, the sun, clouds, milkman (ad nauseum)... If the wearer of this helmet were to be interested only in the newspaper on the step, what would stop the helmet from identifying every other object in view?
Basically, there's so much information in the world, how can a helmet determine that the terrorist in the bush is more important than the cat in the bush? They're both potentially threatening.
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Training the mind or confusing it (Score:2)
It would be interesting to know if this would not just train the brain to warn you in those cases too. You are creating what could be considered a correcting feedback loop.
The question is, where do you make your brain draw the line and will it not teach the brain to just turn off all filters...
Prerequisites... (Score:2, Funny)
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In Soviet Russia, binoculars focus you?
Where's Waldo? (Score:4, Funny)
That's right Waldo, you can run but you can't hide!
My tin-foil hat buisness... (Score:2)
Pro-Spam filter (Score:2)
If anything, will be useful to understand more how and why our perception process discard things. But maybe even walking wearing that things could prove being very hard.
Yes Sir, I think they're all dead... (Score:1)
BRAINWAVE COUNT (0)
Darwin says... BZZZT! (Score:5, Interesting)
The primate brain evolved in a situation where noticing hidden things was kind of important. Didn't see that shape in the grass? Oops, it was a skulking lion, you're dead, return genome to sender. We're the product of millions of years of life-or-death vision tests, and as a consequence, we're pretty good at it.
This device is based on the idea that some part of your brain might notice a hidden thing, but doesn't bother to tell the rest of you so you can react. This is evolutionary suicide. I'd have a hard time coming up with a trait that would be naturally selected out of the gene pool faster.
If this device worked, anyone who could use it would have gone extinct long ago.
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You have to filter, otherwise the signal/noise ratio leaves us in a worse state than not noticing. This looks like it might help negate an overly-zealous filter.
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SydShamino wrote in post #23877239
The system we evolved was "good enough" to get us to age 30 or so and pass on our genes. It's not necessarily good enough to recognize someone on the horizon with a shoulder-mounted RPG launcher pointed at you. Sure, we can be trained to recognize the shapes and shadows which indicate that, but then we have to lo
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I think this design is actually more important with regard to the speed of recognition. In other words, your subconscious brain registers precursors of the identification of an object (or partial object /pattern in the case of camouflage) - and this helmet picks up on those precursors causing a marker to appear in the hud pointing to the object before you would normally be conscious of it.
Essentially it creates a jump instruction in the identification functionality of the brain, allowing the user to bypass
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Point taken. Let's go for a walk in the savanna, blindfolded. I'll let you go first.
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Let me just put on my sneakers so I can run faster.
Yes, I know I still won't be able to outrun the lion. But I'll be able to outrun you.
MGS4 Rip Off (Score:1)
Outside the deflector shield (Score:2)
Scope (Score:1)
My optometrist does something similar â" he asks you to focus at an object while he changes the lenses. He does this automatically by looking at how much the muscles in my eyes strain. If you could do that automatically with a little pattern recognition magic you will hit pay dirt!
Why? Al Gore invented it already. (Score:1, Offtopic)
Pentagon Bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you have to think in Russian? ;) (Score:2)
Somebody Else's Problem fields (Score:2)
Sounds like it would pierce an SEP field quite neatly!
Hooray! (Score:2)
Just what I've always wanted, a Psychosis Helmet!
This is FAR from magic or mind-reading (Score:2)
This is not artificial intelligence, or mind reading, or anything of the sort. It would merely be a slight enhancement of native human ability... and I bet it would take a pretty large piece of hardware today to do it.
Risky (Score:2)
"If you load a mudfoot down with a lot of gadgets he has to watch somebody a lot more simply equipped - say with a stone axe - will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a Vernier".
- Robert Heinlein
This rig could easily distract the wearer by continuously dragging his eyes into distant "ratholes" where some conceivably suspicious activity might be going on. But the very amplification of the binoculars would limit the field of vision to a very small area. Meanwhile, someone might very well
Thoughtcrime (Score:2)
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Ocean Rescues (Score:2)
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