So, yesterday we went rock-climbing in the Ardennes. Outdoor climbing is different from indoor in that nothing is colour-coded, and you can find yourself staring at a blank cliff-face while hanging on by the tips of your fingers and wondering how on earth the last guy got past here. Of course, there's always a way.
While there I met a guy who works as an electrical engineer for a company that makes surgically implanted hearing aids. Turns out there are a lot of similar issues as with the questions below. What I now know:
- LCDs can scale to the limits of etching technology, which (as any chip-maker will tell you) can go right down to the nanometer level. Alrightythen.
- Bandwidth requirements - there are several ways of putting bandwidth across empty spaces, of which radio is the least efficient. He told me about the current & future solutions to this, but they're currently deciding whether or not to patent their solutions, so I'm going to keep quiet for now.
- Detecting brain activity can be done now and is used for people with conditions that prevent voluntary muscle movement. They can use move a cursor across a screen (so 2-bit input) and spell out words, etc.
- This is currently done either with intercranial or scalp electrodes. Larger detectors with a continuous surface should provide higher resolution.
- The whole area is a boom just waiting to happen.
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