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).
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. playing Civilization 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 existing eye-tracking software, 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.
Before closing the video, it’s clear that the first-ever Neuralink patient is optimistic about its future. We hope he’s right. He also encourages other people who want to be human testers for an input device requiring brain surgery to sign up. His optimism is understandable, but we wouldn’t recommend anyone rush into being a tester unless they’re fully comitted.
Like last time, it’s important to remember that these brain implants have allegedly 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.
