Let the photoshopping begin!

When you have such great source material, like these online anatomical atlases at the NIH site (pointed out by Boing Boing), the sky's the limit!

Plasticity

A quick link to a seminar video on visual neuroplasticity. A little dry, but worth a watch if you're interested. Via Channel N.

it is in Real format, but if you have a PC and can't stomach the idea of installing that piece of dreck software, install Media Player Classic.

Generic BCI algorithm?

This hit my radar yesterday because of media coverage, but the paper is actually kinda old (submitted Oct 2006, being published this month). I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I thought I would point it out. (Reported on CNet, paper here)

General Purpose Filter Design for Neural Prosthetic Devices
Lakshminarayan Srinivasan, Uri Tzvi Eden, Sanjoy K. Mitter, and Emery N Brown
J Neurophysiol (May 23, 2007). doi:10.1152/jn.01118.2006
Submitted on October 20, 2006
Accepted on May 17, 2007

Neurobotics 2007 pictures

Here's a link to my Flickr set.

Here's a link to Walid's Picasa album.

Nappy time!

I knew there had to be a phenomena like this. Behold! The caffeine nap!

Drink a bunch o' caffeine and immediately try to sleep for 15 minutes. I have stumbled across this on my own, but never saw anything actually printed on it.

It's an MFin' multi-touch extravaganza!

Yet another reason that full movement restoration is necessary for the paralyzed. As technology advances, the interfaces will become more and more geared toward uniquely human forms of interaction. Controlling a cursor doesn't mean much if it goes the way of trackballs. (Okay, I still know a few people that use trackballs, but you get the idea.)

Multitouch is nothing too new, but has really gained fame for being used in Apple's iPhone. The idea is that a touch sensitive surface should be able to detect when a user is fiddling with it with more than one finger. On the iPhone, this gives the user the ability to zoom in and out from pictures by 'pinching' (or I guess anti-'pinching) their fingers across the screen.

Got $1600 lying around and an itching to show off your latest animation and movie laden Powerpoint presentation. Well Hitachi just rolled out the 77 inch Starboard FX-77 whiteboard with multitouch. I like that you can link up to 50 of them together. Not sure why, but I think that would make for some zany mega-multitouch action.

Another groovy multitouch related product from Sharp is being shown off at CEATEC right now (yes now!). Basically it's an LCD screen that also acts as a scanner. How does multitouch fit in? It can scan the screen for fingers planted against it, rather than using the various technologies listed in the article. How would you feel to have your screen looking back at you!?!?! Creepy. This comes to mind...

And lastly, Microsoft and Mitsubishi has been working on what they call LucidTouch, a fully touch sensitive, two-sided interface idea. I'm not sure what the real utility is besides having some ability to influence the front surface by the grip on the device, but I'm sure some of you creative folks could turn this into an interpretive art thingy. Video below.



Man, Engadget loves the multitouch.

Interface interface interface

My pal Giovanni send me a link to this video on seeing with the tongue. The idea is simple - use an array of electrodes tied to a grayscale camera to perform position reflecting stimulation of the tongue with intensities that vary with the pixel darkness. For instance, if the top left pixel is black, stimulate the front left electrode minimally. If the pixel tot he right of that is 50% gray, stimulate the next lead on the electrode with 50% intensity. The big issue right now is resolution of the device, but I would think that there is a limitation in general on the resolution a person can discern. I don't know much about density of receptors on the tongue, but I think the number is around 50-100/cm^2. Say the pad can be about 4cm wide when tensed and 5 1/3cm (to maintain 4:3 aspect ratio), that's between 1066.6 and 2133.3 pixels total. To put that in perspective, those junky 14" monitors from over a decade ago, what went up to VGA resolution (640x480) 307,200 pixels. That that's not even taking into account any local crosstalk, which could work for or, more likely, against better resolution. Maybe some sort of fovea limitation, with a dispersion from the center, though a the fovea, the human eye's resolution is about 500 MEGA pixels. Still an interesting idea and worth a watch.

Giovanni and Maria Laura pointed me to this blog on general tech stuff, which has a thing for alternative interfaces. Nothing new to me, but I don't think I've posted all the videos they have up there, so worth a look. Not maintained by a scientist, and most of the videos are posted as new, but really old. A few nice demos of the wonky "EEG" systems (I use quotes when I mention EEG and those consumer devices with a single dry electrode). The below video is a must-see, and was caught by this site.