I tried to use my cell phone as bait to get Joshua to take his first steps. Does he start walking? Watch and find out!

Freaky, yeah, I know.  Well, we were watching that on The Soup a few nights ago, and Jessie didn’t get to see it, she just heard the weirdness from her vantage point in the other room. She asked what it was, and I told her: “It’s some freaky, freaky dog. At least I think it’s a dog.”

Well, last night they replayed that episode, and baby Joshua and I were playin gon the living room floor, and his mom was on the sofa. When the dog came on, Josh looked at the TV and then started freaking out like he was scared of it (not that I can blame him), so scared that when I turned him around to face me instead of the TV he shrieked when he saw me, and it took probably 5 minutes to calm him down. The dog came back on the TV a few minutes later, so we had to turn it off and soothe the baby all over again. Poor guy! This is the first time he’s ever acted frightened of something other than just his parents leaving the room, so it was a new experience for us.

Well, Jessie & I were debating whether it was the noise or the image of the dog that scared Josh so much, so Jessie looked it up on YouTube when Josh was not able to see the screen. Guess what? He got scared again, and his Mommy actually had to change his diaper after that!

Emotiv Systems out of San Francisco has been developing a human-machine interface called the EPOC that enables the user to command a computer simply with thought power. This is potentially going to be the replacement for keyboard & mouse or an xbox controller that my children or grandchildren will grow up with.  It’s actually here now, though, as they’re about to start selling these little headsets for $300 a pop, including a game and some utility software.

What prompted me to blog (aside from just the coolness of all that) is the way IGN described the experience as what ‘using the Force’ would feel like.  You visualize a boulder lifting into midair, and an onscreen boulder rises in response. It also senses your moods and your facial expressions, and it could probably tell you what you’d like for dinner.

In purchasing the headgear* you get a chat client, a game, and a way to interact with your music & photos based on your mood. Not sure how all that will work, but you also get a little utility that lets you interface the EPOC with regular PC games & software. What brings this all together is that The Force Unleashed is a soon-to-be-released Jedi game that lets you wreak havoc as a Force-wielding badass.  Imagine actually using your mind to play that game, and bring down a Star Destroyer with your brain! Couple this with a hacked Wimote and you’re a Jedi in your own mind! Of course, I already am, but now I could prove it.

For video click here

For IGN article click here

For Emotiv Systems focus your thoughts on this text

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*I’ll put my skeptical hat on now and ask: Does it seem weird that you don’t have to shave your head for this interface to pick up your brain waves? What if all this is accomplished with a camera, a motion sensor, and clever programming? Any neuroscientists out there who’d like to share their thoughts?

Would you know Emily is not real if you weren’t told that?
Step 2: Read the article. Pretty wild, huh?

I think they missed the boat in releasing the video with the caveat that the model is, in fact, computer-generated. I wouldn’t have noticed until they started messing with her face. Even then, I would have assumed it was new technology to change the appearance of someone’s face, not rendering the whole model out of bits.

I’m a big fan of the ‘uncanny valley’ concept, because I prefer less realism in computer animation, for the most part. Look at the movie Beowulf or Polar Express, and I didn’t even want to see those movies because they were getting so close to realism that it was creepy.

But Emily is so close to realism that if I didn’t know any better, she would have indeed passed my Turing test*. Look it up. Then watch Blade Runner and wonder what the future holds.
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*Okay, I know the Turing test is to determine the human-ness of an artificial intelligence. This isn’t technically about the intelligence, but about human appearance. So what? If I were shown a video of Emily where I wasn’t tipped off overtly that she was computer-generated, I would have assumed this was just a regularly filmed, real-world video. Add machine intelligence to animation like that, and we have our first virtual replicants. Take away the intelligence, and just put a really good machine voice generator to provide the voice, and you’ve got a news anchor that can run the 24-hour news cycle. I wonder how long it would take people to realize that a really well-animated TV ‘personality’ wasn’t real? I think that would be a great experiment.