Hive in the Media

(From ExtremeSciTech Magazine) Feb 21, 2015

PHILADELPHIA - A group of researchers are reporting that they have built the first human-to-human brain-to-brain interface, allowing two humans — separated by the internet — to consciously communicate with each other, with no additional sensory cues. Human Interface for Virtual Evolution or HIVE for short, is a brain-computer-brain interface (BCBI) that successfully linked one Philadelphia researcher to the brain of another researcher in Boston. In short, HiveTech researchers have created a device that enables telepathy. In the future, rather than vocalizing speech — or vainly attempting to vocalize your emotions — your friend/lover/family member might just pluck those words and thoughts right out of your head.

USB-connected BCIs, like the one here by Emotiv, have been around for years.

But that's not all, Hive also acts as your one go-to application that will replace many devices like your phone and computer. 

Over the last few years, international researchers have started to get quite good at reading your brain activity — your thoughts. Commercial brain-computer interfaces that you can plug into your computer’s USB port have been around for a good four or five years now, and in the last couple of years we’ve seen advanced BCIs that can be implanted directly into your brain. To create a brain-to-brain connection (i.e. telepathy) you also need the other side of the equation, however: You need to be able to take some data and input it into someone else’s brain — and that, as you can imagine, is proving to be a bit harder.

This is how a brain-to-brain system works. The BCI reads the sender’s thoughts — in this case, the sender thinks about moving his or her hands or feet. Thinking about feet is equivalent to binary 0, while hands is binary 1. With a little time/effort, whole words can be encoded as a stream of ones and zeroes. These encoded words are then transmitted (via the internet or some other network) to the recipient, who is wearing a TMS. The TMS is focused on on the recipient’s visual cortex. When the TMS receives a “1” from the sender, it stimulates a region in the visual cortex that produces a phosphene — the phenomenon whereby you see flashes of light, without light actually hitting your retina (when you rub your eyes, for example). The recipient “sees” these phosphenes at the bottom of their visual field. By decoding the flashes — phosphene flash = 1, no phosphene = 0 — the recipient can “read” the word being sent.

Now, however, the HiveTech engineers have refined it. Previously on the BCI side of things, researchers have used a fairly standard EEG (electroencephalogram) from Neuroelectrics. For the CBI, which requires a more involved setup, a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) rig was used. TMS is somewhat similar to TDCS, in that it can stimulate regions of neurons in your brain — but instead of electrical current, it uses magnetism. The important thing is that TMS is non-invasive — it can stimulate your brain (and thus cause you to think or feel a certain way) without having to actually cut into your brain and use some electrodes (see: deep brain stimulation). However Hive has taken this all a step further by removing the rigs and creating a BCI - CBI system right inside the users brain, linking natural receptors to an external signal that connects with the HiveTech network. The added virtual display is basically an interactive hallucination that is linked to your BCI interface so you have the ability to work on the application like you would any modern computerized device. With either using the touch-screen or hands-free thought, the virtual display is an extension and tool for your direct communication pathway to the network. 

You would be right in thinking that this is still a ways off from being complete. While HiveTech has reported success with their testing, they have said not to expect a beta version until around 2019 or 2020.