Interesting article on future UI research going on at Microsoft. They are even filing patents on the technology.
- Read the article
- Microsoft’s Patent application
Companies that develop some of the world’s most well-known user interfaces, such as Microsoft and Apple, already know this, but it’s still difficult at times to know exactly what the user might be thinking when navigating through a UI. And while someone has yet to invent a mind-reading device (which would no doubt be used to enhance people’s love lives more than the usability of UIs), Microsoft wants to get closer to it by using an electroencephalograph (EEG) to read brain states of a user.
The company filed for a patent last year, titled “Using electroencephalograph signals for task classification and activity recognition,” which describes a method for analyzing EEG signals as they correspond to different elements of a UI. The problem with EEGs, however, is that the signals are often muddied with extra data €”the blink of an eye or the insatiable urge to scratch an itch can be enough to introduce some curveballs. Microsoft acknowledges that this can be a problem, and notes that there have been some efforts to filter out extra noise in EEG readings. This filtering is not always effective, though, and can be expensive to perform.
