Hold onto your thoughts: Nissan is planning to access our brainwaves
Edge’s Richard Parker considers where Nissan’s brain-to-vehicle scanning technology might lead us. It involves blockchain, Clint Eastwood and a lot of thinking about sex.
I recently read an interesting story about Nissan’s brain-to-vehicle technology. For those not familiar, Nissan is exploring the idea of supplementing your conscious actions when driving – you know, steering, indicating, accelerating, braking etc – with ‘pre-emptive’ automated actions by the car, based on your brainwaves.
The theory being that if you need to brake, your brain knows this fractions of seconds before your foot hits the brake, and those fractions of seconds could be the difference between life and death.
Aside from the obvious Firefox references (and for those born after 1980 I’m referring to the Clint Eastwood movie in which he plays a US fighter pilot who has to think in Russian to control a stolen Russian fighter jet that – you guessed it – is controlled by brainwaves. Russian ones. Not the web browser), this bit of news is actually pretty staggering.
Oddly, I knew this article was going to be written, and it was – word for word.
Interesting Parker, though ads haven’t gone into phone lock screens en-masse and expect similar will happen to cars. Effectiveness of formats is an issue at the moment and these ‘add-on’ style formats don’t seem to work nearly as well as in-situ ‘content-feed’ style formats.
Yes was intended to be a little tongue in cheek Henry. Who knows what safety regulations will be in place and govern what advertisers can do. I do think that in-car screens are likely to deliver content at some point. Think about the time spent waiting in the car whilst a partner pops into a store for example.