What if all you had to do was think of, say, House of Cards and the Netflix app on your tablet magically turned it on? It could be possible soon -- no thanks to magic but to some crazy technology.
Forget motion control. Or even voice-activation technology. Tech giant Samsung is said to be testing a tablet that users can control with their brains. One day, possibly. At least hypothetically.
Samsung's Emerging Technology Lab is working with an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas, Dallas, to develop a way for a person to do things like launch an app, play a song or power up or down a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 simply by thinking about it. Right now, that means wearing a cap on your head that's covered in EEG-monitoring electrodes, according to the MIT Technology Review.
As you can see in the video below, a Samsung researcher tests an EEG-controlled app on a tablet, using his thoughts to make music play and stop, among other things.
As MIT's Technology Review noted, there are some brain-computer interfaces that monitor brainwaves through EEG that are already on the market. For instance, a company called NeuroSky has a number of headset products it says use EEG readings for educational and recreational uses.
Could mind-activated tablets be great for those of us who are just too lazy to swipe a finger across a screen? Sure. But it could someday give people who are paralyzed or suffer from other mobility issues a new way to interact with mobile devices. So, although this project is still in the early research phases, there could someday be multiple uses for technology like this.
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