Facebook buys brain tech start-up as it bets on a future of mind-reading computers
A start-up which builds mind-reading computer interfaces is being bought out by Facebook, offering further proof of the social media giant's ambitions to forge a new kind of link between human and machine.
CTRL Labs, a New-York-based company which has raised $67m (£54m) in funding from Amazon, Spark Capital and others, has created an armband which intercepts the signals sent by users' brains to their hands in order to let them control a virtual keyboard or mouse.
Facebook confirmed on Monday that it was close to acquiring the start-up, though did not say what it is hoping to pay. US media reports suggested a price of between $500m and $1bn.
It is the latest stage of the tech giant's four-year flirtation with building technologies that can read human minds, both through in-house efforts and through funding university research into brain-computer interfaces (BCIs)
“We know there are more natural, intuitive ways to interact with devices and technology. And we want to build them,” said Facebook's vice president of augmented and virtual reality, Andrew Bosworth.
“It’s why we’ve agreed to acquire CTRL Labs. They will be joining our Facebook Reality Labs team where we hope to build this kind of technology, at scale, and get it into consumer products faster.”
CTRL Labs' founder, Thomas Reardon, one of the original creators of Microsoft Internet Explorer who later quit Microsoft to study Greek and Latin, will join Facebook's Reality Labs research group, which helps develop its virtual reality headsets and augmented reality glasses.
The start-up's flagship product is a wristband which bypasses the complex tangle of signals which flash through the human brain in order to listen in on those sent between the brain and the hand via our nervous systems. The technology allows users to type on an imaginary keyboard simply by moving their fingers in the air, and can be activated by very small twitches.
Facebook's interest in BCIs goes back to at least 2015, when it commissioned a "neuromarketing agency" called SalesBrain to monitor people's mental responses to various types of adverts.
At the time, Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said: "One day, I believe we'll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology. You'll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too."
Two years later, at its annual developer conference, Facebook revealed that it had 60 people working on BCIs with the goal of creating a mind-reading system that could let usrs type at one hundred words per minute. "It sounds impossible, but it's close than you may realise," said research executive Regina Dugan.
Last month, the company said it was funding a team at the University of California San Francisco, well known for its medical research programmes, to build a mind-reading system to help paralysed people communicate, adding that it wanted to make such technologies "work for everyone".
Some experts have warned that BCIs will present serious challenges to privacy by giving their creators potentially unfettered access directly to human brains.
