A nine minute video posted today showed the world’s first nueralink patient playing video games with his mind. The professed Charles Xavier fan, paralyzed man and lapsed chess player describes being grateful for Elon Musk’s controversial Neuralink brain interface project after it allowed him to pick Chess and other games back up. We’ve embedded the full video below (expand tweet to see the video).
https://t.co/OMIeGGjYtGMarch 20, 2024
One of the first times Neuralink’s first human patient was given full reign of the brain interface, he proceeded to “stay up until […] 6 A.M. playingCivilization VI,” enjoying the new input method like a true gamer. Due to the sheer scale and time investment of Civ 6, paralysis would have prevented him from having a proper gaming binge, but Neuralink made it possible.
For the video demonstration, the Neuralink subject is mainly testing online Chess, but the Civ 6 comments make clear that it’s suited for long-term use. When learning controls, he first started differentiating attempted and imagined movement. Then, he mentally ‘moved’ his left and right hands and finally just focused on cursor movements. According to him, this feels akin to “Force Manipulation” in Star Wars.
The main form of control seems to be staring at a spot on the screen in order to move the cursor there and click. This actually sounds a lot like existingeye-trackingsoftware, which can be applied to existing webcams without brain surgery.
The main downside described by the patient is the eight-hour battery life on the unit. He seems quite happy with it otherwise.
Like last time, it’s important to remember that these brain implants haveallegedly killed several apes, and Elon Musk still denies that to be the case to this day. There may be more promise in eye-tracking camera software that doesn’t require brain surgery as well, if cursor control is really all this Neuralink is capable of.
Get Tom’s Hardware’s best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.
