Comment by DanielleMolloy

Comment by DanielleMolloy 10 months ago

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Thank you for sharing. I'm in research that is somewhat attached to the technology side and find 2) particularly interesting.

Did you ever look into electrotactile tongue display units? What is your opinion?

I'm curious about what neuralink will present soon. Musk mentioned "atari graphics" recently, so they probably will for now only focus on generating phosphene-based crude bitmaps in the primary visual cortex (which has been demonstrated to work years ago). I can't know what they are up to and believe / expect they are internally more ambitious about stimulating the higher visual system. But if it boils down to the phosphene bitmaps I expect TDUs (which have FDA approval, already seem to work well and don't require invasive surgery...) to become part of the discussion.

jesterswilde 10 months ago

I haven't ever even heard of electrotactile tongue display units. Got a link?

I am generally more optimistic about technology if it's generally beneficial and not targeted at blind folks. If we just happen to ambiently benefit. Self driving cars and things like Neuralink fall into these categories.

Blind folks are a small percentage of the population and we don't have a lot of money. So the incentives aren't usually there to help us.

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  • DanielleMolloy 10 months ago

    The brand name I know is BrainPort, which gives you a 20x20 matrix with three intensity values (on, mid, off) on your tongue:

    https://www.wicab.com/brainport-vision-pro

    I found a few others while digging to find this again.

    I can't say how well the translation of the picture into these matrices works, but expect these devices will also benefit from the research into the phosphene stimulation matrices, which (to the best of my current knowledge) have the same pixel matrix resolutions and thus the same problems to solve. A substantial part of the research aims at extracting meaningful pixel matrices from regular cluttered visual scenes through deep learning.

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webspinner 10 months ago

I'm so not curious about neuralink! Probably because in the past my parents have literally wanted something like this for me. I do not live with them now, but i have a feeling if they hear about it, it's something they're going to really, really push me to try!

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tway_GdBRwW 10 months ago

I guess that might depend on how much you trust Musk.

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  • DanielleMolloy 10 months ago

    I trust Musks ability to attract stupid money and hype towards highly beneficial technology and research goals.

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  • webspinner 10 months ago

    About as far as I can throw anything, which isn't far.

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