Andrea Stocco is quoted in a Futurism article about the technology in Black Mirror.
Dark Future: Here’s When We’ll Have the Black Mirror Tech That Lets us Share Physical Sensations
by Victor Tangermann on December 31, 2017
A Twisted Museum
Miles and miles of desert and open highway — and then, a small roadside museum, one of those things people pull over and visit to stretch their legs but rarely seek out on purpose. It looks uninhabited; its windows are barred with rusty metal, making it a dark blemish on the peaceful, dusty continuity of the desert.
Sometimes, things look exactly as they should…because what’s inside Rolo Hayne’s Black Museum is just as twisted and dark as its exterior suggests.
“There’s a sad, sick story behind almost everything in here,” whispers Rolo Haynes, owner and proprietor, to the museum’s sole visitor. Haynes has collected criminological artifacts, each of which tells its own story of hope, pain, and horror. But unlike a collection of medieval torture instruments in the basement of a history museum (and in true Black Mirror fashion) each artifact was once a gleaming specimen of cutting-edge neurotechnology.
One of the most disturbing sequences hinges on headgear-like tech. In its former utility, the cap-like device, we learn, would gather information about the physical sensations of its wearer non-invasively. The information from the transceiver would then be sent wirelessly to a neural implant that was once installed in the base of a doctor’s skull, right behind their left ear. By slipping headgear gear onto a patient, the doctor could feel the physical sensations of the wearer.
However, there’s a non-invasive way to do the same thing, in which a device reads brain signals from the surface of the skin. “If you go the non-invasive route, you have the luxury of recording from multiple sites, sometimes the entire brain, without any surgery. However, you lose precision,” says Andrea Stocco , an assistant professor at the Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. That is, because the receiver is so far from where the signals are coming from in the brain, devices often can’t pinpoint their origin closer than a general area.
Read the entire story here .