Social media giant Facebook has acquired New York based startup, CTRL-labs, which builds non-invasive neural interfaces that allow users to control computers with their brains.
Bloomberg reported that Facebook had acquired the company for a price of between $500 million to $1 billion. The latter price would make this Facebook’s biggest purchase since the acquisition of Virtual Reality headset developer Oculus in 2014. Incidentally, the news comes as Facebook hosts the Oculus Connect developer conference in San Jose.
Facebook’s Vice President of AR and VR, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, made the announcement on Tuesday, describing the CTRL-Labs product as a “wristband that lets people control their devices as a natural extension of movement,” adding that Facebook “hopes to build this kind of technology, at scale, and get it into consumer products faster.”
The acquisition will bring CTRL-labs under Facebook’s Reality Labs division, which is the successor of the erstwhile Building 8 initiative for moonshot technologies. By late 2018, Building 8 split up into Facebook Reality Lab for AR/VR projects and the Portal group for other consumer hardware products.
CTRL-Labs CEO Thomas Reardon had described the product, at Slush 2018, as the world’s first non-invasive always-available and always-on neural interface technology”. Highlighting the distance of capability between human beings input and output, he added that he believed that with neural interfaces, you could exploit new powers that you did not even know you had.
Product demonstrations have shown users able to type out words by just tapping their fingers on a table, play videogames like Asteroids with no visible motion from their hands, and manipulate a 3D-model of a hand on-screen using just their thoughts.
In essence, the wristband takes signals sent by your brain to your muscles and translates them into an electrical signal that a machine or computer can read.
For Facebook, the acquisition may lead to the breakthrough they have been looking for since 2017, when the company first announced that it was working on a technology to let users type with their minds.
However, the technology raises privacy concerns for a company that has a controversial track record of accumulating its user's personal data. While it is not yet known how a Facebook-branded consumer product using this technology will function, the increase in human data collection that it will allow raises questions over how the technology can be used as well as abused.
