Facebook shelves its brain-reading interface project to move in a different direction

Facebook Inc. proclaimed in 2017 that it was developing noninvasive technology that would measure thought signals, but today the company announced that the dream is no more.

When the company announced it was working on a Brain-Computer Interface or BCI that would allow people to “type just by imagining the words,” there were of course skeptics. One neuroscientist said, “It remains to be seen how realistic it is to get this highly detailed information noninvasively.”

At the time, Regina Dugan, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, asked the question, “What if you could type directly from your brain?” That seemed like an outlandish question, but it was also a noble ambition that, if it succeeded, could help disabled people live better lives.

The plan was to use near-infrared spectroscopy technology to measure brain impulses. People would have to wear some kind of device on their head, and then thinking alone would lead to action that would normally be typed by hand.

“Even something as simple as a ‘yes/no’ brain click, or a ‘brain mouse,’ would be transformative,” Dugan said at the time. The end goal, however, was to create a technology that would allow someone to think into existence 100 words per minute.

Today, Facebook said that over four years the team working on the technology has made “great progress,” but the company admitted that the goal was perhaps a little overly ambitious. Reality Labs has not given up, though, and is now currently working on a different way to use BCI technology.

“While we still believe in the long-term potential of head-mounted optical BCI technologies, we’ve decided to focus our immediate efforts on a different neural interface approach that has a nearer-term path to market: wrist-based devices powered by electromyography,” said the company.

Explaining how this would work, Facebook said brain signals that lead to the movement of the hand and fingers will be turned into digital commands when captured by the wrist device. “These signals will let you communicate with your device with a degree of control that’s highly reliable, subtle, personalizable, and adaptable to many situations,” said Facebook.

Used with a virtual or augmented reality headset or glasses, hand and finger gestures will be captured, giving a person the ability to do things in those realities with very little movement. This could be typing letters on a virtual keyboard or shooting someone in a game, which sounds more realistic than brain reading.

Facebook has now open-sourced its BCI software and will also give access to the hardware its developed in an effort to move the research forward.

Photo: Facebook