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Comment by kasperni | Hacker News Reader

> So, a user is in a mixed reality or virtual reality experience, and AI models are trying to predict if you are feeling curious, mind wandering, scared, paying attention, remembering a past experience, or some other cognitive state. And these may be inferred through measurements like eye tracking, electrical activity in the brain, heart beats and rhythms, muscle activity, blood density in the brain, blood pressure, skin conductance etc.

I don't really know how I feel about this...

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> I don't really know how I feel about this...

But the headset of course does !

Otherwise, it could be interesting if as users we got access to all these measurements, for our personal use. That could open the door to many other applications that would be probably less creepy.

> could be interesting if as users we got access to all these measurements

You can! It's not trivial, but not very hard either.

eye tracking - OS projects getting this from a laptop camera exist and work well enough for assistive tech (i.e. it can replace your mouse today)

electrical activity in the brain - there are fancy things like https://zeto-inc.com/device/ but there are basic options as well

heart beats and rhythms, muscle activity, blood pressure, skin conductance - there's lots of cheap sensors for those

I assume GP means that the measurements would be exposed (at some helpful level of abstraction, plus also the raw data say) by the Apple Vision.

I know ; ) I wanted to show there are already alternatives for whose who are interested in experimenting with that data themselves (and at a fraction of the cost)

This quickly becomes creepy beyond my wildest imaginations. Kill it with fire, please.

Why? The more personal a device is and the closer it becomes to interfacing with who we are, the more it will need to do things like this to work, else it will just feel off.

You have emotions , the device does not. No matter how we pretend to ignore it, the ability to empathize and embody the emotions of others separates us from machines. Even if they emulate it, i know they are fake (yes, i am being a machine-racist here)

There's the good ol' bait-and-switch of tech industry you have to consider. New tech is promoted by emphasizing (and sometimes overstating) the humane aspects, the hypothetical applications for the benefit of the user and the society at large. In reality, these capabilities turn out to be mediocre, and those humane applications never manifest - there is no business in them. We always end up with a shitty version that's mostly useful for the most motivated players: the ones with money, that will use those tools to make even more money off the users.

It's true with all new tech these days, and I'd be doubly worried when it comes to things like emotion detection. There are no good uses with strong business cases, but plenty of nefarious ones.

PC makers selling TPM to everyone: "We'll make your computer more secure!"

Reality: "We'll use it to store media encryption keys, so hollywood will let us stream media to your device."

I’m using TPM with free software and my own keys. It works fine.

Why do I want a device to be “personal” and “interface with who I am”?

Except that device is not owned by you, or even accountable to the public. It is owned by a private corporation whose mission is to do whatever it takes to keep you making purchases to make stock price go up.

I do not even carry a smartphone anymore and am happier for it.

in 2013 Edward showed that data are used by governments. We do not see it right now, but it does not mean it does not happen. Actually I think we do not see the scale of it, because most of us are not doing anything incorrect. It is only important for our politicians. Everybody is under surveillance. It is just we do not know the effects of it.

That's the kind of personal data that shouldn't be on a device with an internet connection.

Yes if it was a standalone device which no outside party had control over then sure. But that's not practically what any tech device has been in the last 10 years. Everything phones home. And with the amount of valuable personal data this thing could accumulate, you can be sure it will be phoning home about it all the time.

Fully user controlled device running only free software ? Sure, agree totally!

A totally closed hardware & software combination tethered to a corporate cloud ? NO WAY IN HELL!!

Give it 30 years for the open source option to catch up.

One thing that's notable about devices that "only run free software" is that they actually don't, since people use web browsers on them, and the websites are not free software.

You'd also have to never talk to another person with them, since other people are capable of manipulating your emotional state and can't be audited.

Think of the possibilities.

-A VR show can modify the jokes in real time if they know how funny you find them.

-A VR casino can offer a 'full biometrics' table for the players who really think they know how to bluff

-A VR porno can have your VR GF climax at the same time as you

> VR GF

This seems like an oxymoron. I get that it's a "virtual" girl friend which semantically qualifies the term girl friend, yet there's something immensely sad about the combination of these terms.

VR sex bot seems more apt to me. It doesn't really matter and I don't mean to impose terminology on anyone; it's just an observation/reaction.

Sex bot implies sex in some form, that I don’t think is primary value of a such system even if it all available.

The ability to form a connection and understand your needs perfectly and respond to that a companion is the real value

Sex gets boring pretty fast . It is not that expensive to pay for in real life, a companion would be supportive, knowledgeable, empathetic and always available is very hard to pay and get or have otherwise .

I don’t know why people find it sad , not everyone is able to find the perfect (or any) human partner /companion , we should be happy if we are all are able to connect to sentience does it matter if it is a human , dog or a machine ?

I'm not opposed to it under all circumstances. What worries me is that people will do it under too many circumstances and fail to engage with the real thing. That seems like a tremendous loss of social opportunity which I'd argue is already occurring with technology today.

Think of the possibilities

- they can track what you fear

- they can track what you like

- they can track what enrages you

Agencies will love that data.

Advertising paid for by the blink.

Regarding your first bullet, I am not sure if that's what people want. One of the best part of story telling like a TV show or movie is that everyone watched the same thing and then can refer to it later. How much more isolating does VR tech need to be?

> How much more isolating does VR tech need to be?

As isolating as it needs to be to extract max revenue. Your fine-tuned proclivities profile will be one more thing to lock you onto the platform, and an opportunity for product placement/ ads. Marketers would love to have their brand associated with happy thoughts (and happy thoughts only).

There is more:

> Other tricks to infer cognitive state involved quickly flashing visuals or sounds to a user in ways they may not perceive, and then measuring their reaction to it.

And still, there will be people who will happily pay for it.

No guarantee that any of these will ever become part of the product though.

The post is talking about past research work and about patents; Apple has lots of unused patents.

I wonder how much they can plug into the new “autocorrect” system in iOS? Ok user heart rate is low and at baseline, they probably were trying to say “I could give a flying duck”…

Pupils dilated, heart rate racing, therefore “duck” may not be the right word..

Given Siri’s reaction when it fucks up for the 5th time in a row and you tell it to fuck off…

I would not bet on it.

I d think those are detectable from facial expression alone. There is also EEG as a possibility

Reminds me of dreaming.

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