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Siri "mind control" iPhone 4S hack is fake, here's the breakdown
Brandon Davenport
It’s called “Project Black Mirror” and it’s quickly become a sensation among technology enthusiasts. Why it’s so awesome is because it takes raw brain activity and translates it into commands Siri (iPhone 4s) can understand, essentially allowing you to control your iPhone with your mind. In theory, Project Black Mirror sounds incredible, and the video demonstrations are mind-blowing, but instead of riding the wave of hype, we decided to wait for the dust to settle and stand by for the voice of reason to emerge. The verdict (as it stands) is Project Black Mirror is 100% fake. We explain the buzz-kill after the break!
Project Black Mirror in action
It’s easy to be swept away with the astonishing notion of a “mind controlled iPhone”, and the video itself is very convincing, but there is so much wrong with the demonstration and so many loose ends that the entire thing has been pretty much debunked.
Take for instance the technical terms used in the video. The “ECG” pads they point out in the video is the first point of failure. ECG pads are used to measure electrical signals from the heart and not the brain. If they were actually measuring brain activity, they would be using an EEG system, and you’d think that after weeks (or months) of development, they’d have had these basic terms nailed down. This is one sure sign the entire ruse was an “off the cuff” venture.
Another point of interest is the speech synthesis chip which (if it was actually functioning) would have been shorted out by it’s placement on the board. The list goes on and on, but the things that flip the entire demo on it’s head are the most obvious. The un-necessary blinking lights (the only function the Arduino board is used for), the Matrix scroller on the MacBook screen and the overall clumsy execution.
Experts in the field are a little pissed off
I’m one fo the founders, and the COO of InteraXon, which is a thought-controlled computing company in Toronto, Canada. (Here are some links to our past work)
This is wholly a fraud. There are multiple glaring inaccuracies in the way they talk about brainwaves. The idea that 0v is a “low” brainwave signal and 5v is a “high” brainwave signal is absurd. EEG signals are tiny fractions of a volt.
They have the “ECG” pads plugged directly into an arduino. This would never work. You need sensitive amplifiers to make the signals detectable.
I could go on. The speech synthesis chip’s pins are shorted on the breadboard. Detection of more than a few basic types of brainwaves requires a system with many, many electrodes. (The eMotiv headset has 16 and has fewer than 25 individual commands.)
This hoax is as disappointing as it is clumsy. These people are damaging the work of hundreds of committed researchers, product developers and entrepreneurs around the world who are working to bring affordable, compelling brainwave experiences to market.
Our company is raising funds to support the launch of our first consumer product, and now 5 minutes of every VC meeting we have for the next six months is going to be spent explaining why this is bullshit. Then we’ll have to spend the rest of the meeting playing against unreal expectations.
It’s hard enough to communicate past people’s expectations from science fiction without these assholes deliberately misleading the public.
Comment by Franks2000inchTV on Reddit
It’s not about all of this though
Whether this is an elaborate scheme to make money, gain popularity or generate a buzz-storm, these guys aren’t just pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, they’re overshadowing decades of very real scientific research (which is far more impressive) with their shenanigans, but enough of this crap… it’s not about this.
You think we’d be mad at these guys for doing this, but we’re not (they actually trolled magnificently). What it’s all about is the fact that blogs and news sites are gobbling this up and spewing it out to the world without a shred of fact checking. Here at Okay Geek, we may not be first on the scene, but you can be damn sure we won’t lead you in the wrong direction.
The marvels fact checking can do.
