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Have you ever wanted to play X Box games just by thinking about moving the character on the screen? Well, now we are one step closer to making that dream a reality with an experiment conducted at Washington University in St. Louis. Patients were able to send signals from their brain directly to a computer to control a cursor on the screen. This will lead to incredible advances in medicine, computing and most importantly…. instantly Tweeting from your brain.
A temporary surgical implant enabled patients to “talk” to a computer. Just by thinking the words aloud in their head they were able to control a cursor on a computer screen. The brain-computer interface (BCI) technology could one day be used to help people who are unable to talk or have other physical disabilities due to brain injury. The technology could one day be used to read a person’s mind.
Microsoft’s cool Surface computing device costs $12,000 and is not yet available to the public, so the folks over at Maximum PC decided that they’re going to build their own Surface-like computing device using open-source software.
The result: a fully-functional multitouch device that lets you play games, manipulate documents, and use google earth-like applications. The final price of all the custom hardware was less than $500, not including the actual computer and a borrowed projector.
Maximum PC’s post details their entire build process and explains the technology behind their DIY multitouch machine:
There is, it turns out, a whole community of very smart folks out there on the internet perfecting the art of building DIY multi-touch surfaces. The process isn’t exactly simple, but the results we saw were stunning: multitouch surfaces with responsiveness rivaling Microsoft’s $12,000 offering, built in a garage on a shoestring budget. “Future UI article be damned,” we thought, “we’ve gotta build one of these for ourselves.”
And so we did. We documented the whole process, from start to finish, so that you can try building one of your own, if you’re so inspired. We’re not going to claim to have done everything perfectly the first time, so think of this article as more of a build log than a definitive how-to.
From the Upcoming 
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Wired celebrates the 40th anniversary of the unveiling of the first computer mouse on December 9th, 1968.
Computer scientist Douglas Engelbart kicks off the personal computer revolution with a product demonstration that is so amazing it inspires a generation of technologists. It will become known as “the mother of all demos.”
The presentation included the debut of the computer mouse, which Engelbart used to control an onscreen pointer in exactly the same way we do today. For a world used to thinking of computers as impersonal boxes that read punched cards, whir awhile, then spit out reams of teletype paper, this kind of real-time graphical control was amazing enough.
Englebert also demonstrated other computer abilities such as hyperlinks, windows, and videoconferencing, among other ideas we use today, although it took the computer industry decades to implement them. Link
In addition, Wired has a gallery showing the evolution of the computer mouse. Link
(image credit: SRI International)
