Facebook wants its augmented reality glasses to read your mind

It turns out Facebook's research into brain-reading computers is still very much alive, and the work could have significant implications for another one of the company's ambitious projects: augmented reality glasses. 

On Tuesday, Facebook gave its first significant update on its brain-computer interface research since it first introduced the project onstage at F8 in 2017. The ultimate goal of the work, as Facebook has described it, is to create a system that can "decode silent speech" without the need for implanting electrodes into the brain. 

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, who have been collaborating with Facebook, say they have taken an important step toward that goal in a new paper published in Nature. The researchers, who were working with people already having brain surgery for epilepsy, created an algorithm that was able to "decode a small set of full, spoken words and phrases from brain activity in real time." Read more...