Laziness About to Be Rewarded. Big Time.

May 26th, 2009

Have you ever been sitting on the couch and increasing your body mass by drinking Mt. Dew and stuffing cheeseburgers into your face only to find that you can’t find the remote, it is too light in the room because you don’t have any pants on, and the curtains are open? Well things may be looking up for your disgusting self .

A demonstration at CeBIT in Hannover this past March, provides an innovative way of controlling the interconnected electronic devices that will populate the smart homes of the future, granting increased autonomy to people with physical disabilities as well as pleasing TV channel-surfing couch potatoes.

Check this out:

“The BCI lets people turn on lights, change channels on the TV or open doors just by thinking about it,” explains Christoph Guger, the CEO of Austrian medical engineering company g.tec that developed the application.

g.tec teamed up with a group of international universities and research institutes as part of the EU-funded Presenccia project to incorporate its BCI technology into virtual environments. As part of the project a fully functioning smart home was created in virtual reality (VR).

“It has a kitchen, bathroom, living room… everything a normal home would have. People are able to move through it just by thinking about where they wanted to go,” Guger says.

So…you can basically sit in your chair and perform basic lazy functions with your newfound Bioshock plasmid, Telekinesis. (Just got done playing Biohock)

Here is how it works:

Electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment is used to monitor electrical activity in a user’s brain via electrodes attached to their scalp. After a period of training, the system learns to identify the distinctive patterns of neuronal activity produced when they imagine walking forwards, flicking on a light switch or turning up the radio.Eventually it learns how to do it for you.

This was developed to help people with disabilities of course, but surely the lazy are looking to benefit as well. These aren’t people that are going to make plans to go rv camping anytime soon obviously. Who cares if you look like a swimmer with a bunch of boils on your head. You are a fat slob anyways. It isn’t going to make much difference is it? :p