As if a future filled with unmanned drones hovering overhead wasn't scary enough, here comes a miniature helicopter controlled by someone's mind.
The folks at Puzzlebox, an open-source project meant to teach people about neuroscience, developed a toy helicopter that is steered by a pilot's brainwaves last year. A headset reads the EEG, or electroencephalography, signals from the brain, which in turn control the motions of the copter. Puzzlebox CEO Steve Castellotti stopped by HuffPost Live to explain:
Roughly what we're doing is looking for a rhythm, looking for a pattern. If you're looking all around the room and thinking 80 different things, there's messages shooting in every different direction, there's no rhythm there. But if you're doing math homework or translating to a foreign language or any sort of steady, sustained train of thought, there's a rhythm like someone beating on a drum. We can pick that up from the electrical signal and use that to fly the helicopter.
The company's technology is open-source, meaning Puzzlebox hopes other ambitious developers will tinker with it and make improvements that everyone can build upon.
Catch the full segment on the mind-controlled helicopter at HuffPost Live HERE: