The OCZ NIA Brain-Computer Interface
by Michael Lin
Full article here
OCZ Technology has laid claim to being the first company to bring a “brain-computer” interface to the retail market and they have aimed it squarely at the search engines. The device is called the NIA, which is an acronym that stands for Neural Impulse Actuator, and instead of buttons, sticks, gyroscopes or motion sensors, it reads the body’s natural biosignals and translates them into commands that can be used to interface with semantic search engines
The NIA is able to detect three types of biosignals generated by your brain, facial muscles and eye muscles via a special headband. The user can bind these signals to any keystroke using the driver and configuration software. This allows the NIA to take the place of any keyboard command. OCZ claims the NIA allows for a new level of immersion not possible with traditional tactile input devices. Not to mention the obvious advantage in input response time that a brain-computer interface could provide.
Now you may be understandably skeptical, as we certainly were. The whole concept of the NIA sounds more than a little outlandish. When we first heard of OCZ’s interesting “brain-computer” interface a couple of years ago, we couldn’t help but have visions of The Matrix. The very notion of controlling a computer with the mind conjures up images of exotic, fictional technologies from sci-fi movies. We were also slightly skeptical about the NIA’s ability to improve the search experience, even if it were to work as advertised. Don’t get us wrong, controlling the computer hands-free with our mind sure sounds neat, but we really like our mice, keyboards and touch screens. Perhaps we’re old fashioned but there is at least one member of the AltSearchEngines team that thinks the keyboard and mouse are the only input devices you will ever need, well at least for the foreseeable future.
As technologically challenged pundits at a search engine blog, there is only one way we know how to settle our suspicions and curiosity, as well as try and shed some light on this product for you. So we’ve obtained a retail-ready NIA sample and have put it through its paces to see for ourselves if it’s the real deal or just another gimmick product.
Editor’s note:
If you enjoyed this post, please read this excerpt from What the Internet is doing to our brains.
by Nicholas Carr
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:13 am
This is another advance in this type of technology. I think OCZ did a great job with the NIA, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see something like this that will allow full keyboard control within a couple years.