Hacker News Reader

Comment by kanzure | Hacker News Reader

> - New interfaces to replace keyboard/mouse/touch. Voice, gesture, face, brainwaves.

Unfortunately, it turns out you can only get a limited number of bits out by looking at brainwaves (EEG). Gesture is much higher bandwidth, and keyboards seem to be the highest.

View on HN

fMRI is extremely high bandwidth and still in its infancy, and we are currently getting pretty good performance from relatively basic invasive neural implants on the disabled. I've read a couple of interesting articles on breakthroughs regarding the miniaturization of fMRI technology, so I think it's safe to say that keyboards will not be the highest bandwidth interface in the decades to come.

I agree that there's useful information in the brain that we can extract. EEG isn't that method. I love fMRI as much as the next guy. fMRI isn't reading "brainwaves". It images a correlate of neuronal oxygen depletion which indicates metabolism and activity.

waves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#Wave_pat...

versus this awesomeness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemodynamic_response#Functional...

But American Sign Language is gestures, and it seems higher bandwidth than spoken English. Just an informal uninformed observation, I don't know ASL.

And I can't type as fast as I can talk. So I'm thinking gesticulating > speaking > typing.

> And I can't type as fast as I can talk.

Some of us can.

http://www.seanwrona.com/typeracer/profile.php?username=kanz...

Well, almost. Mobile interfaces certainly aren't helping. I am not sure how much I would like a vocal way of typing out code, but I suspect I wouldn't.

Saving this post to laugh at later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com