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by kanzure 4929 days ago
> - New interfaces to replace keyboard/mouse/touch. Voice, gesture, face, brainwaves.

Unfortunately, it turns out you can only get a limited number of bits out by looking at brainwaves (EEG). Gesture is much higher bandwidth, and keyboards seem to be the highest.

3 comments

fMRI is extremely high bandwidth and still in its infancy, and we are currently getting pretty good performance from relatively basic invasive neural implants on the disabled. I've read a couple of interesting articles on breakthroughs regarding the miniaturization of fMRI technology, so I think it's safe to say that keyboards will not be the highest bandwidth interface in the decades to come.
I agree that there's useful information in the brain that we can extract. EEG isn't that method. I love fMRI as much as the next guy. fMRI isn't reading "brainwaves". It images a correlate of neuronal oxygen depletion which indicates metabolism and activity.

waves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#Wave_pat...

versus this awesomeness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemodynamic_response#Functional...

But American Sign Language is gestures, and it seems higher bandwidth than spoken English. Just an informal uninformed observation, I don't know ASL.

And I can't type as fast as I can talk. So I'm thinking gesticulating > speaking > typing.

> And I can't type as fast as I can talk.

Some of us can.

http://www.seanwrona.com/typeracer/profile.php?username=kanz...

Well, almost. Mobile interfaces certainly aren't helping. I am not sure how much I would like a vocal way of typing out code, but I suspect I wouldn't.

Saving this post to laugh at later.