Your Body as a Computer Interface

Laura similar no, no, no breaking news. We got a tweet on Twitter from one Chris Newcomb who said, in case your listeners didn't know concrete ships, and he provided a link and and said, hey, local kids swim around this thing for fun. And the link is to a wiki entry for the s S. Palo Alto, which is a concrete tanker ship from World War World War One. Why are we bringing this up? Is it because in a recent episode we made jokes about concrete ships. Yes,

that's exactly what we did. In our Building Materials episode, which came out a couple of weeks ago or so, we all had a really good lull about how concrete ships are completely ludicrous idea that no one would ever possibly put into use. I think specifically what happened was we were talking about what you should make out of concrete, and I said, obviously boats. Yeah, I had no idea that this was a real thing, in my defense, because

I was the person who immediately struck that down. This ship was retired like in nineteen nine and then it broke in half. So but there are totally ships that are made to this day with pharaoh cement, which is a type of concrete that's reinforced with like mession rebar and stuff like that. Uh so, so that happens, and I just wanted to wanted to update you guys important news updates. Well, thank you for the info, Chris. I

I feel much more educated than I was before. And I also now feel like I have a magic power to make unlikely seeming things real by laughing at them. So what if there was a boat made out of uranium? You know what. As as funny as that is and as much as I would love to dwell on it, I I did. I did a little bit of research on a totally different topic. Uh yeah. Yeah. First of all, thanks again Chris for sending that message. And we we really love hearing from you guys, and it was awesome

learning something that we thought was ridiculous. Up today, we're gonna talk about something else that at times comes across as a little ridiculous, which is the idea of what is the future of the kind of the interface that we use between us and our technology. Specifically, what happens when we turn ourselves into that interface. Yes, but in your face is what happens. I guess that kind of is. I wanted to do you guys have any like really

good terror will interface stories? Well, I mean, just here, did you have a favorite terrible interface? To me, it's it's not so much a terrible interface as it was a frustrating process of learning how to use it. I'm left handed, and I'm old enough to remember personal computers before the mouse, and when the mouse came along, and then suddenly the mouse was absolutely required in order for you to be able to to navigate through software, it

became very difficult for me. Like other folks were picking up on it very quickly, for me, it was more work because I didn't have that kind of fine tuned precision with my right hand the way I do with my left hand, and they didn't have left handed mice, and and by the time they did, I was so used to using my right hand. For that, I couldn't use a mouse left handed. I mean I it felt wrong and and nonintuitive because I had trained myself how to use it with my right hand. But for me,

that interface initially at any rate, was not great. But that was again due to my own personal uh, left handedness, my sinister state of being. You know, I think you've probably had experiences with other maybe awkward interfaces. What about Google Glass? Yeah, Google Glass. Actually I was all right with Google Glass because I knew going into it what the interface was going to be like. But in general,

actually Google is a great example. Just in general, Google, uh is a company that is clearly populated by engineers who have a very specific idea of how to solve a problem which may or may not translate to any other human beings experience. And so when you use a Google product, you have to kind of learn how to think in the way the engineers were thinking when they

designed it, and then it works. But initially it can be very difficult to kind of suss out what you're supposed to do or how you're supposed to get your technology to do the thing you wanted to do. Yeah, we'll show I mean there's a learning curve to any kind of interface that you use to to to use technology. I'm still completely mystified by the N sixty four controller designed for someone with three hands. I just speak about it.

It just makes me frustrated. It just makes me feel like I'm about to lose and get a turtle shell, right, Or the old or the very old Microsoft Xbox Duke controller, which was roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle like some of those, or you'll think about some of the really frustrating interfaces that were meant to be groundbreaking, like the power glove. I mean, I don't know if you guys might be too young to appreciate what a terrible, terrible product that was. I never I never owned one.

I don't think I even knew anyone who had heard tales I played with one and it was you would rapidly go from this looks so cool on me too, this is completely are useless if I want to actually play a game. Um. Yeah, there are a lot of examples of interfaces out there that got in the way, and really what we're trying trying to talk about today is the attempt to get the interface out of the way to have a seamless interaction between us and the

technology that we depend upon and want to use. Yeah, okay, so I guess we should do a quick bit of definition just in case you haven't been following us so much so far. You probably have, but just to be clear, what is an interface. It's a system that controls in putting output. It's the interaction between a human and a computer. And so this can be hardware or software. The hardware would be things like a screen where you see what's coming out of the computer. You can know what the

computer is doing for you. And hardware input like a mouse or keyboard. Uh. And sometimes you can combine input and output into a single device, for example a touch screen. Classic example in putting output in the same object. But interfaces can also be software. So the classic example is the graphical user interface. Like when you go and use Microsoft Windows, you're interacting with memory in the computer through pictures.

You know, you move files around into different folders. Really that's data coded to different locations in the memory, but there's a graphical representation of it for to make it easier for you. You're also executing programs that are represented

as a some sort of graphic Uh. You know, of course, if you were using computers before goo ease became a big thing, then you were typing all those commands out and you had to remember what all the different commands were in order for you to do things like navigate to the right directory file directory to execute a file. But the the graphic user interface ends up simplifying that

by creating this visually oriented approach to interfacing with the computer. Yeah, and so if you look at the history of computing, it's clear that interfaces are always changing, but not necessarily at a constant rate, not like at the rate that processing power seems to steadily multiply over time. Right. Yeah,

this is another great example. We've talked about this when we mentioned Kurt's Wild and Kurt's Wild's look at things like Moore's law, and you start to try and uh and and draw conclusions about what the future is going to be like when by using Moore's law as your starting point. But that is really deceptive because, like you're saying, Joe, not everything and not everything progresses at that same speed, right well, and and that speed in particular is a

little bit uh what's the word self? Oh, there's self fulfilling. Yeah, it's a self fulfilling prophecy, because no engineer wants to be in the generation that let Moore's Law die, you know, Like, no, we've got to figure out another way to double the processing power of this computer within the next eight to twenty four months. Yeah, but but no one has figured out how to double the mouse. Right, Hey, guys, I came up with it, a taped a mouse on top

of another mouse. It's double mouse. Doesn't really work that way. So early computers didn't have a monitor or display, right, You would get your output in some other format, Like it could be punch cards. You could get a series of punch cards. You've run your your program through. Your input was punch cards, your output is a different set of punch cards, and that's your compiled program. That kind of stuff. Or you might get like a printer that prints along along uh strip of paper like it like

tape essentially is what it ends up looking like. Actually, a friend of mine, Richard Garriott, he's known as he's a game designer. His first game that he ever designed printed on tape like that. So every move you made in his little dungeon based crawler, it would print out what that looked like. It was just a very simplified representation of a dungeon, and when you would make a move, it would have to print another sheet out to show

you what had happened. The rich the whole idea of the interface of the universal touring machine was a strip of paper and which in which calculations would be done one at a time, printed on a long strip of paper. Yeah. So eventually we of all beyond that. We got monitors and displays. Uh, we got keyboards, which were much easier to use as an interface with a computer as opposed to just a collection of punch cards. Later on we

got the mouse UM. Xerox ended up Xerox's Park department figured out the mouse and the graphics user interface, although of course it was Apple that took great advantage of that with the McIntosh UM, and so that became like the standard interface for computers and the mouse and keyboard for a really long time. Was that was the input? Yeah, I mean you would you had some other like fringe

input systems, things like light pens and stuff. But yeah, but the enjoy besides the joystick, the general public really didn't interact dance Revolution pad Yeah, Now these days, we we've gotten to a point where we're seeing a real revolution, interfaces revolution, right, It's weird that we think of that we think of like keyboards and mice, mice, mouses, whichever it is. Um, this is standard, the standard way to control input right now. Screens are still pretty much paramount.

But i'd say that, you know, I bet the majority of our web traffic comes from touch screen devices, not mouse and keyboard driven devices. That's absolutely correct, and you can see it by looking at the metrics. Um. Yeah, we're getting tons of traffic through mobile, and mobile in general is using touch screens. Now, you could also use voice commands for a lot of that mobile stuff if you were so inclined, just your commands to say, okay, Google,

how stuff works? Dot Com. I apologize. If you're listening to this on an Android device and you have the speaker active, oh, you could do just your control through an Xbox Cannet Act or something like that, and they're the leap controller for PCs. There are a lot of the examples of that. We'll talk a little bit more about gest your controls in a bit, but but once you get into gest your control, you're entering a new kind of territory, aren't you, Because they're the issue is uh, well,

think about it like this. You're you're using the body itself as part of an interface with a machine. So using the bodies an interface. It's an interesting and kind of counterintuitive idea, since an interface is supposed to be the bridge between the computer and the power of the computer and you, the user, what you're getting out of it. But if you think about it, we've been bridging this gap for so long with physical devices that are connected

to the computer. Why not flip the script and build a bridge in a place that's physically connected to the user. And we've seen some some examples of that as well. You could argue that the ore headsets are are getting into that where you are are wearing the computer device and your physical motions are what allow you to experience that computer power in the way it was intended. Sure, or the aforementioned connect sensors, You're you're using your body

to interact, Yeah, exactly. So, uh, you know, we're gonna talk a lot about that stuff in more detail a little bit later. We're also going to talk about not just ways where you are interacting, you know, in order to create input into a device, but also how you

experience the output from that device. Right yeah, uh, so you know we should mention some basic ideas in what what what's on offer here in terms of the body is an interface, so the input is probably the more obvious one with input, Instead of pressing buttons on external device, moving a mouse or whatever, you might simply perform an

independent action by and of your own body. So this could be gestures, movements, poking yourself, wiggling a part of your body, wiggling multiple parts of your body, parts of other people's bodies. No, see, then it wouldn't be it wouldn't That wouldn't quite meet the criteria. I think, well, it's still be a body interface, it just wouldn't be your body advocated. Have a dead body. I should have a Bernie device that reminds me of a movie that's

coming out the go ahead. I think a complicated system of shrugs would be really good, right yeah, right, so you never have to lose your cool while you're controlling your phone. I meant to, I meant to do the the please tell me more shrug, but it turned out I just did the shrug or a combination of side eye and shrug. Anyway, the key ideas that you don't have to touch or manipulate anything except your own body. You've got it with you all the time. So there

you go. And it's not this This idea isn't super weird to us because we're already familiar with stuff like the connect and gest your controls to some extent. Then if they're not super awesome yet, but then you've also got output. So instead of having to look at a screen that's attached to an external device, which would cover the vast majority of output today, I'm having trouble even thinking of a standard device that has a very different

way of doing it than this. Well, I mean there's a growing list of devices that now are using audio, so things like Amazon's Echo, right that that would be Yeah, that's a good example. But but I get what you're saying. Yes, the vast majority, I would say, are are visually oriented. So yeah, instead of that, information about your computing task is made available directly to your body. The classic sci fi example of this would be this internal retina display.

The screen is projected directly onto your retina. But I mean that's a little crazy. We probably won't have anything like that for a long time. If ever. Now we have some other examples that we'll talk about when we get to a haptics because that's one of the other methods of getting back from a computer that can be meaningful.

It's just not visual. Yeah. So I would say the middle step between standard input and output devices, standard interfaces and this your own body as an interface would be wearables because that's it's getting close to your own body, but it's not quite your own body yet. Yeah, it could be something that is unobtrusive where you might not even think about it consciously after a while after wearing it. Yeah, sure, like a like a fitbit or the pieces of jewelry

that they're coming out with something like that. Absolutely, that was a great example, and fitbit is in fact a fantastic example because so much of that interface is invisible to you. That again it's the idea of removing that barrier. So a fitbit is going to be tracking your steps. You might have other wearables that are doing things like tracking your heart rate, uh, that sort of stuff, where the data is going to some form of cloud based solution or or potentially just being beamed to a local

UM advice. Like a smartphone or tablet, you're still usually dependent upon that other device in order to be able to consume the data in some way. It's presented to you in some way, so it's not like it's directly getting that data to you through the device itself. You're you might have a display on the device that gives you some of the basic information, but your body is not acting as the display, right, it's still the device. UM. It does allow us to have other means of interacting

with our technology. Some wearables, you could argue, like the Nintendo Power Glove was a wearable, particularly good one, but it was a wearable. It was not not unobtrusive, not you know, it was definitely you knew someone was wearing one.

But it allowed well that was part of the point, right, You wanted to show off that you were playing with power Yeah, exactly, and you had a glove to p and you looked a little bit like Michael Jackson in that air a little bit, yeah, which at the time is really importantly Yeah, because if we couldn't get the jacket, we could at least get the power glove. But the the all remember the nightmare on Elm Street movie where Freddie wears the power Glove. I remember seeing it, don't

from my mind? I okay, definitely. Oh god, I was so worried about myself for a second there. Okay, Now everything's gonna be fine. You guys late at six though, I think that probably are on four. But at any rate, I get what you're saying. Um. Yeah, So so one of the things I wanted to talk about this is kind of a This is looking ahead at wearables. So you could have wearables that are are something that you

don't interface with directly at all. It could be you know, we've we've talked about the possibility of things like r F I D chips that have a profile. This is sort of the sort of thing that Bill Gates was putting in his house where you would get a little r F I D D badge that would have a profile programmed into it that's personalized to you, and then you're experience as you walk through his house would be to see the kind of art that you like, to

hear the kind of music you like. The lighting condition would be to your preference. Uh, it would be dependent upon that profile. We've since reached a point where we can get a little more advanced than that. You don't necessarily have to have a wearable anymore for that kind of stuff. But that was one implementation. Another however, is this, uh, this this haptics feedback solution that I had been talking about, so being having to do with your sense of touch exactly.

So we already are familiar with technology that has haptic feedback. Here's one you're very likely to be familiar with. If you ever played a video game where the controller buzzes in your hand when you do something right. That's the

old rumble pack, right. Those have been around for for a couple of generations of video game consoles and also for PC controllers, and generally speaking, you you want to have a controller that enhances the experience of playing a game, so it might be a great example would be a stealth based game where you're you're skulking around in the shadows and your controller might start to vibrate to indicate that perhaps you are visible or potentially visible to an enemy,

so you need to get back into cover. Yeah, yeah, a vibration being being like your Spidey sense going on. Yeah, Or if you're if you're playing a horror game and your your life starts getting too low and you start feeling your heartbeat through the controller, and that lets you know that you need to drink a health potion or you know, just to spell whatever it is, right, or

unplug the game and going to the corner. Yeah. Uh, if pyramid Head is coming around the corner, you just want to, like, I just I just need to go and read a happy book for a while. Uh. Or you know. Another one that everyone is probably familiar with are the vibrating motors in uh, in smartphones or cell phones. Yeah, yeah, right, And that's a very simple Yeah. Yeah. They maybe they vibrate when you're doing an input, or they vibrate to

alert you that a call is coming in. But that's that's the happy feedback, very basic application of haptic feedback. I don't know if you've ever had the experience of getting so used to this that it's weird when it doesn't happen. I've had this experience with my phone where I don't even notice anymore that when I punch a key to like enter, you know, to enter a letter on a text message or something like that, the phone vibrates a little to register like, yeah, I got that,

I got that. Letter uh. And if the it's on very low battery and you go into energy saver mode, it'll stop vibrating when you enter keys, and it feels very weird. You keep wondering like, wait, did that keep? Did that press? Did it take? In my old phone, I actually turned that off because the the it was reminding me of that episode of the I T. Crowd where they soup up Roy's vibrating motor in his cell phone.

Because every time I would type in a letter, it made a really loud, like eat noise, to the point where if I wanted to check something out and my wife was napping, I would wake her up. So I finally turned it off. My current phone much more subtle, so I'm all right with it. I've never had a phone that did that. Although it did, it did scare me every time I was I used to I used to have a fitbit that I would wear constantly, and whenever I went over ten thousand steps in the day,

it would it would do this like buzz buzz buzz. Yeah, party times and You're thinking, I'm having a heart attack. Make what's going on? Sometimes sometimes the acclamation period takes a little longer for certain types of technology than others. Well, one of the things I wanted to talk about, and in fact, this was one of the stories that kind of prompted the this entire episode was this research project.

Some people at the University of Sussex, with funding from a couple of different companies and organizations, have developed something they call skin haptics, and this is a device that gives haptic feedback but does so without a moving, vibrating type of motor having direct contact with your skin. It actually does it through ultrasonic frequencies. Crazy, right, So I did a how Stuff Works Now piece on this How

Stuff Works Now for those who do not know. That's where we at how stuff works post stories that are happening right now, the kind of newsy type of stuff, and it tends to be science and technology focus, but not necessarily. We've done some other things that are outside of the realm of that, but I tend to focus on science technology. A lot of them do since it's a since it's research that's just coming out right now and so so a lot of that has to do

with technology and science. Yeah, So this particular one, they're using ultrasonic waves that you have a little emitter that would go on the back of your hand. So you would put this emitter down and it would be facing down towards your palm, you know, through your hand, and

it would admit ultrasonic frequencies. They would move through your hand, through your very flesh and bones, and concentrate on points on the other side, so that it would feel as if something was making contact with the home of your hand with like with like focal points on your Okay, okay, sure,

so imagine that. Imagine that you have a screen projected on your hand and it's a number pad, and when you press, not only do you get the feeling of where your finger touches your hand, you then get a confirmation through this ultrasonic frequency saying yeah, yeah, you totally you totally touch the one that button worked. Or you're playing let's say, you know, you're we're really looking in

the future here. You're playing angry Birds on your hand and you pull your little your little bird back and you let go and the bird collides with a pig and then your your hand vibrates right at the point where the bird and pig collided. That kind of stuff. Um, that's the idea behind it. Now, this is just the haptic feedback part, not the display. Your beautiful far future definitely still includes angry birds. I don't I can't imagine

a future without it, and I don't want to. Uh, But I was thinking that this, this same technology could be used for stuff where you don't have a display

element at all. So imagine, if you will, a a bicycle or a car that has sensors on it that can detect potential obstacles, dangerous collisions, that kind of thing, and you're you're using this device, and it alerts you by creating pressure on your hand through this mirror, and perhaps is even telling you almost radar like where that threat could be coming from, so that you have the opportunity to react and avoid it. In other words, you

have spiky sense. You could even do this on a personal level if you don't mind wearing a super dorky helmet that's got sensors all over it. I mean, I can't really think of any implementation where you would be able to have sensors mounted in such a way that you didn't look completely weird, as long as it's modeled after visually modeled after the calendar that Rick Morani swears and Ghostbusters right, uh, yeah, the as the the was he was he the key Master? Was he the gate keeper?

He was the key makey master. Yeah, he's Vince Claro, key Master of Gozer right yeah. So uh, if you for that important research, if you want to tell him about the Twinkie. So if you want the if you want the key master look and you don't mind it and you want to have Spidey sense, then we could probably work something up once the University of Sussex guys get this completely ready to go, like ready for prime time.

But it's a really cool idea again of using that touch feedback where the body itself becomes the the method for you to uh to experience this technology, and you've stripped away anything else, like you don't have a screen or anything that you're dependent upon. You're just feeling this. Yeah. Yeah, there's there's no way to to leave the device behind

because it's attached to you. Yeah. Now we could go the next step, which is where our largest organ the skin, becomes an interactive surface something that you use to interface with technology like the touch screen on your phone. And so today if you want to read or send a text message, you'll usually hold your phone in your hand and read the text off the screen or type on

the screen by pressing letter buttons with your fingers. I've actually slowly started to move to voice to text, but that obviously only works in special situations where you know. It's really annoying when you keep doing that in meetings, I don't. Yeah, I can't do that anymore in in meetings or generally in public. But like, if I'm on my own, if I'm walking my dog and I need to send a quick text to my wife, I often

will use voice to text. Um, and then people just think that I'm married to my dog, which because they're like because because of the messages, Hey honey, do you mind picking something up on your way home? And I don't think that dog is gonna be at all cooperative that. It's great when you hear people saying I love you, babe to a lamp post ye, look, don't judge. Okay, you don't know their love. I saw the brave little toaster and that lamp was adorable at any rate. Yeah.

So so, so we've got a device in the way here. Before we can get to Jonathan's uh perfect Angry Bird's future, we need to take away that screen in front of that physical device. So imagine that same experience sitting there with your phone in your hand, type in a text message on it, or reading a text message off of it, but without the phone there. And there's where you get

this concept. One implementation I saw of this was a thing that was from the Hasso Plotner Institute called the Imaginary Phone, which was a project by Sean Gustafsson, Christian Holtz and Patrick Bowdish. And Imaginary Phone. It sounds great on one hand because it's like an April fool's Frankly, you give somebody a gift, it's oh, it's your new iPhone. It's an imaginary you think. Yeah. But so the last I heard of this project was some media coverage in

two thousand eleven. I don't I don't know if it's still in the works, but the idea, at least it is interesting enough that you could continue it to be adapted with new hardware. And here's the basic way it works.

And you wear a depth sensitive camera on your chest um and then you hold out your hand in front of you, palm side up, and then you interact with your own hand the same way you'd interact with the phone screen, you know, you press parts of it and the camera tracks your movements and sends them to your phone or other device as input commands. So different places on your hand correspond to different inputs on a phone screen. To swipe across, your fingers will swipe the screen. You

can dial numbers by pressing different parts of your palm. Um, And that's interesting in terms of input, but obviously if you're just looking at your hand, that sounds like a kind of annoying thing to learn to do. Sure. Yeah, I have a really hard time typing texts out when I can see the letters on the screen, so I'm picturing that that wouldn't go very well for me. Yeah,

and so what about the You basically need a corresponding display. Uh. The appeal of the touch screen is that you you can see what you're interacting with and perform your interactions in the same place. And that that brings us to this idea of projected displays on skin, which inherently isn't There's no real problem with that except that it just requires some good, non invasive, comfortable design and some good engineering,

I guess. So one project I came across that was trying to do something like this was the secret Bracelet projects secret c I C R E T. I didn't Maybe you're supposed to keep it secret, keep it safe. Anyway, there was some coverage of this project back and the idea is it's a bracelet. It looks kind of like a jawbonu up. You know, it's a bracelet that has a low angle projector on it that projects a display onto the surface of your forearms. So you wear it on your wrist and it projects at a low angle

up onto your skin on your arm. And if you go watch the the original video promo for the project, you will see animations that are I mean and obviously that they are animations because it was before the thing was made, just trying to say here's the concept, well, probably just a concept, here's the concept of And you could see that people were mad that it was. It was making it look like these displays would be incredibly

sharp and beautiful looking. Um and that's probably not going to be the case, especially early on, and they might

have been optimistic. But now there are prototypes, I've seen videos of them being used, and the image quality in the real world it might not be amazing, but also it's not too bad, And that also might not be that big of a deal, because what if you're not really planning on watching movies on your arm, But what if you just wanted to be able to use your arm to send a text message or something without having to mess with a device, get a device out of your pocket and deal with it. Um, yeah, it's an

interesting idea. It's one of those where a lot of the ones we're talking about now you still have to pair it with another device. Right, So then the question is is the benefit of whatever this body interface is that benefit greater than the frustration you might have of

just taking your phone out and doing these things. One of the things I was first thinking about when you're talking about typing stuff on your palm with the earlier implementation, was well, what if you wanted to make a phone call, you would still have to get your phone out? And then I thought, wait, no, you're making a rookie mistake, Jonathan. No one uses their phones to make phone calls anymore.

So I don't even know why that crossed my mind, because I'm a dinosaur, is really what I'm getting at. But another haven't had a good job at an age choke in a really long time. Well, we haven't. We haven't ever had a good Jonathan age, Joe. I think I think Jonathan made some get off my lawn jokes just last week. Okay, to be fair, I also talked about acid rain in the episode we recorded immediately before this, and talked about growing up the eighties and being afraid

of communists. So, which, by the way, was a product of the time. Um So, one of the other things I want to talk about about bodies and interfaces doesn't have to do with displays. We talked about the haptic feedback, We talked about visual feedback. What about audible feedback? Using your body to make sounds and not in like a middle school kind of way where you're you're showing your friends how hilarious you are by utilizing your body to

make various fart noises. That's not what I'm talking about. Sure, And I mean and I mean we we're making sounds with our bodies right this very much. Sure, But what if we could it's a relatively easy system, what if we could make that that whole process more convoluted and creepy like instead of instead of just talking to you like a human be ng I. You and I would still have to be in the same space for this to work, but then we make it super creepy. And

by creepy I mean creepy. Well, I'll explain what I'm talking about, and you tell me if I'm off base calling this creepy. The system I'm talking about is called inshin denshin um and this was a a concept out of Disney research actually, and it is all about turning your body into a transmitter um and it's pretty wacky.

So think of one person being the transmitter. This would be someone who's like the speaker, as in the person speaking, not not a speaker in the electronics sense, and the other person, yeah, the other person is the receiver or the listener, and together you end up creating a speaker

in the sense of electronics. So the transmitter person speaks into a microphone, and presumably they're saying something quiet enough so that the other person isn't hearing it, So they might be whispering something like a like a I want to go to lunch today, and you whisper it into your microphone. The microphone transmits that that sound wave. It actually transforms it into a high frequency low power electrical signal which your body can carry because our bodies actually

can conduct electricity. So then yeah, yeah too well in some cases, which is you know, that's why you've got to be real careful around electricity, but one of the many reasons you should be. But let's say, all right, you've got this microphone. You've just whispered something into it. It's now transmitting a low power, high frequency electrical signal through your body. You then walk up to the person who is the receiver, and then you just casually reach

out and put your finger on that person's ear. This is the part where I think it's kind of creepy. And then the connection that you make with that other person connection, that's what allows this area to suddenly become like a speak and the person whose ear you're touching will be able to hear the thing you've whispered into the microphone. Uh So, it's also interesting in that you

can extend this by having multiple people involved. It's almost like playing a game of telephone that you could whisper something into the microphone, put your hand on someone's shoulder, they put their hand on the next person's shoulder, and the next person and then that person puts their finger to the recipient's ear, they would hear what you had originally whispered into the microphone. I don't know that there

is any practical application of this technology. It's just another weird way of turning the body into an actual interface. You know. I do try to keep an open mind, but uh, but burn all this with fire. I don't really like it when people touch my ears. Yeah, I I I like. I like listening to a s MR videos in which there is an ear massage element going on. But the actual thought of someone physically coming up and

touching my ears squeegs me out a little. I feel like that's a violation of personal space that I'm not ready to deal with casually. That's something that should be left up to U two con alright with people exactly. This is CLF of five. I mean, I could I could see it being used in uh, in some other way of transmitting information. Um well, it could be an interesting way of being able to transmit information quietly, but

you still have to speak into the microphone the first time. Well, I mean, if it wasn't using if it wasn't using sound waves, if if something, if if you could hook yourself up to some kind of device that would read that, not not literally out loud in your ear, but that would that would read the information and be able to I don't know, uh, yeah, I don't know it later. You couldn't because you couldn't do it to yourself because you wouldn't be creating a full connection. You have to

be touching somebody else. So I mean some something like like oh, here's my business card hand shape. I could see some game elements in there too. But again it's a little little wacky and little weird, but it was an interesting way of looking at turning the body into an interface if you wanted to go the next step, like let's say we've gotten past the wearable stage. I think a lot of people are imagining the body as interface with embedded technology, stuff that would be incorporated into

us if you're really desirous of surgery. Yeah. Uh. And according to Repo the Genetic Opera, there is totally a group that's in there. Um. But yeah, this would be where you would actually have some sort of technology is embedded in you. And obviously, at this point we're talking pure speculation. There's not examples of this beyond stuff that bio hackers are doing. And even in that case, they

tend to be incredibly primitive applications of technology. Uh, and it may be that we won't see this kind of stuff for quite some time for lots of re Now, we do have examples of embeddable technology biotechnology generally speaking, though they are designed to address a problem. Like let's say that someone wishes to they have a visual impairment that they want to overcome, that there might be technology they use in order to supplement their eyesight or their

hearing with like cochlear implants, that kind of thing. Now we've got examples of that, while we don't really have our examples of attempts to enhance already quote quote normal or within the norm kind of of human capabilities. And I hate using that phrase, but that's the way it tends to be free. I mean well, and medically speaking, there is there is there is an average or normal, and it's and it's not meant to but absolutely yeah.

And and the and of course that the problem there is is that any responsible medical person isn't going to recommend I mean, I mean, surgery is always dangerous. Getting an implant of any kind is always is going to carry an element of of you could get an infection and can go terribly wrong. Your body could could reject whatever it was that was implanted. Yeah, yeah, it could script your immune system for that reason. Lots of things like that. So therefore, and we talked a little bit

about this in our Hacking your Body episode back when. Yeah, and there are other things obviously that you have to keep in mind, things like the technology's battery life. How do you recharge a battery? What is it? Is it drawing power from the person in some way? How can you create something that you make sure that it'll it'll work within the body and not breakdown or otherwise end up falling apart within a certain amount of time because the body, I don't know, if you know, this not

the most hospitable environment for technology. Yeah, yeah, it's there's there's that rest thing that we were talking about oxidizing. Yeah, yeah, that's a that's an issue, right, Yeah, you know, bad guacamole in the bloodstream. That's not something we want to mess around with, right, And there are there are lots of researchers who are working on ways to to get that to be better. Yes, you know, specifically for things like like a like a heart monitors and and and whatever.

But but it may be quite some time. Even if we get to a point where the technology is reliable, where it's safe, where where the the potential for complications is as low as we can possibly make it, there's still going to be a barrier there where the medical profession in general may see it an ethical issue of do I do I do this? Uh cosmetic it would essentially be akin to cosmetic surgery, but possibly with far greater uh ethical concerns than your average cosmetic surgery. Is

it ethical for me to perform this? Am I going to risk my my livelihood if I were to do this? And then you might eventually get to a point where socially it's more accepted, But there's probably gonna be a lag between when people are actively advocating to get this done to themselves and when it becomes socially acceptable in general, And and that period is going to be interesting to watch and find out, like how it'll it'll almost help determine how long it takes to adopt that as uh

a perfectly standard kind of practice. Um, then there comes a question of hals versus have nots? There are other conversations that happen further down that line, which fall more

into that singularity conversation we've had multiple times in this show. Now, the cool thing I think is that you could argue a lot of the technologies we're seeing right now are negating the need for surgery in the first place, and it's largely through things like machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive technologies, very simple sensors working on very complicated algorithm to respond to our needs in a way where we we become

unaware that our environments are adjusting to us without our

direct command. So a very simple example of this would be something like a nest thermostat or some other smart thermostat, where it starts to learn quote unquote what you like, what your preferences are that maybe you like it pretty chilly at night, but you like to wake up to a nice, warm, toasty house, or or it's recognizing when you are home versus when you are not home and thus adjust the temperature so that you are being uh, you're conserving energy whenever you're not in the house, and

you're not just wasting electricity, although that that is still through through the pairing of a device yeah, it's pair well, it's pairing a device through a WiFi network. You don't necessarily have to have it paired to, uh, like a smartphone or anything. But then interesting thing is it is detecting when you are there. It's detecting what you want, and it's responding without you having to make a direct command. Although there's an acclamation period at the beginning where you

are making those commands. Otherwise it doesn't know. It's not like the thermostat takes a look and like, uh, this bald guy, he's gonna want its seventy degrees. I'm just gonna go ahead, and no, I gotta tell it that I wanted seventy degrees first. So I think what you're saying is we're all going to get thermostats implanted in our bodies so we can be seventy degrees on the inside. That that's not what I was suggesting. But it always is interesting to get an insight into your thought process.

Joe Um. Yeah. So, but my point think how much energy you'd say if you didn't have to make the whole house seventy degrees it's just your own body. And my point being that we are seeing some technologies come into play where our bodies are in a way becoming an interface. But it's through it's not through a conscious effort for us to control that technology. The technology is responding to us, and if we see that increase in other ways, it may turn out that the more invasive

approach becomes moot. We don't need it because we're able to compensate with other technologies that are able to do these things through machine learning. Well. When yeah, when you speak of the ways our the ways technology is adapting and learning from us without our knowledge, I mean I wonder about, you know, as Facebook going to get to the point where it uses the camera on my computer to look at my face and see what disgusts me and show me more of that because I'm more likely

to click on it. Yeah, I mean, there are certainly privacy concerns with this, this particular approach, and and we've already whether whether or not it's a privacy concern. Let's say I authorized them to do it. I mean, either way, that they're responding to your unconscious cues that you give with your face and your eyes and everything like that. Yeah, I mean, that's that's something that I'm sure there are people looking into I mean one the next thing we're

going to talk about where our micro expressions. Micro expressions being these these very tiny gestures you can make sometimes unconsciously, and how people are hoping to turn those micro expressions into a way to interface with technology, largely because I think most of us don't want to have to make big gestures on our bodies in order to control technology.

Would be better to do very subtle things. Yeah, there has to be some kind of happy medium between having to make flag symaphore motions that you're connect and uh and having a brain implant. That's that's directly reading please now, chicken dance d answer this phone call right right. Yeah, there's so many great comedy sketches that could be a result of this conversation. But uh, there was a piece

that was written in Fast Code Design. Andy Goodman and Marco Reghetto wrote by there that that design company your yes, yeah, yeah, and uh, and we'll come back to that towards the end of it too. But it's they were arguing that the motions we make with body interfaces should be minimalistic and that there's already precedent for this. When you are moving a mouse. This is one of those problems that I had when I was learning how to use a mouse with my right hand. Uh, the small motions you

make are translated into larger motions among on screen. Right, So when you when you move the cursor on your screen, you don't have to move the mouse the same distance on your desk as what you're seeing on your screen at right. If you are there's a problem, you need to change some settings. But generally speaking, like you might move your mouse over an inch, but you are moving

the equivalent of like five inches on the screen. Well, I mean, do you do you remember when the Nintendo we came out and how long it took people not that long to figure out that all these games that were supposedly about like doing big motions and getting exercise, you could actually just sit right there on the couch and kind of flick the controller to accomplish the same thing. Yeah, there was a specific flick of the wrist. There was

a game, an arcade game. It was a boxing game where the controllers were like two big boxing gloves, and it could detect when it had motion sensors cameras essentially mounted on the top of a frame looking down so you can tell when you were ducking or moving left or right. And then the controllers actually had most most

accelerometers in them to tell when you were punching. But turned out that if you just stood there and just bang the gloves together, it counted it as a punch, so you wouldn't get tired very quickly, and you could just you could play longer. Yeah, you could wipe out like the first five or six guys on that on that yeah, just doing that. I did not learn that until after I had actually hurt my back playing an arcade game, and that's the first time I ever felt old. Um. Alright,

so Jonathan's coolest anecdote. Yeah, I mean, I've gotten to the point where I just have to I have to

own it, right, I just got to own it. So they thought the writers of this piece thought that those minimalistic kind of movements that you would see with a mouse should be the same sort of things you would see with a body interface, so that you could do very subtle things to control your devices, as opposed to doing things like swiping up and down your forearm in order for you to just say the volume of music being played on your device or the lights in your

home dimming or getting brighter. I think God. One of the examples they did is about like putting your thumb on one of your your tongue on one of your teeth. I have a quote, so don't jump ahead. Yes, so specifically I in the sections that the description can get a little creepy. So this is this is a paragraph that Joe was just referring to in this piece. This is uh. Think about this scenario. You see someone at a party you like. His social profile is immediately projected

onto your retina. Great a match. By staring at him for two seconds, you trigger a pairing protocol. He knows you want to pair because you are now glowing slightly red in his retina screen. Then you slide your tongue over to your left incisor and press gently. This makes his left incisor tingle slightly. He responds by touching it. The pairing protocol is completed. Horrifying. Yeah. The next piece I wanted to talk about this is describing a party hook up in terms of like the stuff you would

do too. I don't know, initiate trading in a massive I think what I think what they were looking at was they were like, you know, tinder is great, but not nearly creepy enough. Yeah, we we don't touch our teeth at all during tinder, right, and we need to We need to really get some tongue to tooth action going finger it too, because otherwise how will he know that you're interested in him? So No, I'm confused about the part where it says his his incisors starts to tingle.

He responds by touching it. Does that mean with his tongue or with another part of his body or with someone else's tongue. Who's to say? The world is full of amazing possibilities. It's funny that you read. I read this exact same piece, and I did not decide to include any of it because I found it off putting. Well, the reason specifically I decided to keep to include it was because, to kind of conclude this conversation, there are people who are saying, do we even want our bodies

to be a technological interface in the first place? Right? There was there was a really good piece written more or less directly in response to to that piece, Yes, to the Technology Review, Right, that by John Pavlis, who wrote his piece was titled Your Body does not want to be an interface, which pretty much tells you what the argument is going to be. It's a very well

written piece and it's it's very interesting thing. Um. And he first argues that turning bodily experiences or motions into a command issued to technology would make it feel unnatural an alien, which is the opposite of the intention, right. The intent is to remove that barrier between you and technology so that a natural motion gets interpreted as a

command and the technology response. But he says, if you're doing this quote unquote natural motion in order to issue a command, you're not really being natural by definition, because you are you are issuing a command to technology something that is not a natural thing for us. It might become something that ends up being second nature after doing it enough times, but in itself it becomes this alien task because now you're you're trying to do something in

order to make a command. I can easily understand what he's saying, because if you've ever worked with a voice command system and you have to issue commands in a specific way in order to get results, it feels very unnatural because you're having to preface what you say with some sort of command, or you have to word it in a specific way for it to understand what you're saying.

It is not a natural thing, um. And so he says that we would make ourselves kind of hyper aware of how weird it is to like run our fingers along the inside of our forearms to adjust the dimness of the lights in our house or whatever. And Pablus refers to a computer scientist named Paul Dorish or Dowrish, who in turn took inspiration from a philosopher, Martin Hidegger. Hidegger Hidegger was a boozy beggar, according to Monty Python, and uh, it was all about differentiating two general types

of tools. The first type was is called the ready to hand technologies. Those are things that feel like they're an extension of our bodies. Uh. And so think of a hammer when you're hammering a nail, he says, that would be a very very brute version, or in my case for this weekend, the rapier. I've been working with one for a while, so it feels like an extension of my arm when I first picked it up. That

was not the case. It would fall into the second category of tools, which, uh, you know that one is the present at hand type so ready to hand type. That's the kind where as you're using it, you're not even really thinking of the tool as a separate thing from you. It's an extension of you, right, but the present at hand, you are aware of the presence of that tool. So, for example, when I was learning to use a mouse, I was hyper aware of the mouse because it was so hard for me to learn how

to use. It was something that I was absolutely conscious of. It did not feel like an extension. These days, it totally does, because I've used it enough where I've reached that level of familiarity. So things can change. Yeah, anyone who's learned how to play a musical instrument, for example, has probably gone through this. Yeah, that's a great, a

great way of putting it. So any of you out there who think back to when you first started learning how to play any kind of musical instrument, think about your first day when someone first said, like, and this is a chord and you went little nope, yeah yeah, Or you're like, especially with stringed instruments, where like your fingers start to hit other strings, so you're muffling some of the chord. You know that doesn't sound right? What

is going on? Here, and you feel in that first stage like you're never gonna get it right, it's never gonna happen, like you have to concentrate so hard. But then eventually you start to develop a familiarity and it becomes that first type of tool where it just feels like an extension of yourself. Um. He says, the problem is if we turned our bodies into interfaces, at least for a while, they would turn into that second type of tool, that our bodies would feel weird and alien

to us. He specifically took the the example of John Cusacks character and being John Malkovich trying to control John Malkovich. That's like a marionette dealing with a puppet, and and it's not you. You're not skilled yet, you don't know how to manipulate it properly. But instead of it being another person's body, it's your own body. And he says,

that sounds like an awful experience. I don't want that. Yeah. Yeah, it enters into this, And I guess I was sort of emotionally reacting in this way when I was thinking about some of those examples, the tooth touching and whatever. Uh, it enters into this kind of Cronenbergian sort of sort of body horror area where you yourself are a foreign object. Yeah,

and how do how do you deal with that? Well, you reconcile that the two and you figure that that these these interfaces are ultimately going to be designed by somebody who thought this has got to be the best way. This is the way it makes sense to do this thing, right, But that's not you. So it may be that something that seems natural to the person who designed the system is completely unnatural to you, and then you have to commit this unnatural motion in or to do something you

want to do. That's not a good experience. And yeah, I I think there could totally be a Cronenberg style body horror film based upon this premise. You know, even if you're even if you're doing something that isn't on the surface horrifying, if you make it clear that it is something that doesn't feel right in order for you to get the response you want, that is a very disturbing idea. Yeah, I wonder if this is the kind

of thing. There's been some research lately into common facial expressions that that people across the world all make that There was one story that came out that I think the aforementioned how stuff works now uh covered about a nope face that that apparently it's just common to too many human populations. This this like I'm disinterested and I don't want to be interested kind of kind of facial expression.

And so I wonder whether further research into that kind of thing could possibly identify common, common micro gestures that are just ubiquitous that would be natural for people to use, and that technology could pick up on without us even really being having to be aware that we're making this the and and of course the challenge there also is that how do you how do you determine which ones need to be conscious decisions on the part of the

person interacting with technology, Because if it's an active thing, you don't want to you don't want to accidentally activate your technology. If all you need to do is like scratch your nose or whatever whatever tiny thing it might be, or that you're blinking at a certain frequency, whatever it might be, you don't want to be activating your technology accidentally.

Like like I ended up taking a whole bunch of pictures of myself when I was looking like a complete du fist because it just so happened that the thing that I was going through at that time was the same as my command, Hey take a picture now, So there are some challenges. Yeah, I think I was thinking like so far ahead, like to the like her kind of university. That the idea where you actually have this world that can anticipate things like like the nest thermostatic

model but on steroids. You know, this idea of we we talked about this in our our Internet of Things episode where he said, you know, you extend this idea outward far enough. It's a an environment that anticipates everything you need before you even are able to consciously think of what those needs might be. That's that's kind of the end destination that people really hope to get to. But the question is what is the actual pathway we take to get there. Is it something where we've turned

our body into an interface. Is it something where all the interfaces blend into the environment, but our bodies just become the way we interact with it. They our bodies don't become like a control system, like we're not necessarily using our body to to dial up the volume or whatever. Um. But it could be some combination of the two. We don't know yet obviously, and it may be that in a generation or two these sort of things will be so second nature to people that they'll think it was

weird that we thought it was weird. Who knows, but it was fun to look into this. So guys, if you have any thoughts on this particular topic, or you have requests for things that we should cover in the future, please get in touch with us. Let us know what you think. Our email address is f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can always drop us a line on social media. Over on Twitter, we are f W Thinking. If you go to Facebook and search f W Thinking, our profile will pop right up.

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