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Sony Patents Ultrasound Brain Beam Matrix
Science fiction novels published by Vernor Vinge and William Gibson created the idea of a computer technology that could project an organized world of sensory experience directly into your brain. Now entertainment giant Sony has patented a method of beaming an artificial world of experience - The Matrix - directly into your brain using ultrasound.
Elizabeth Boukis, spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, says the work is speculative. "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us." The application has references to several research papers; one showed in a Galvani-like experiment that ultrasound impulses can affect the excitability of nerves from frogs legs.
The first science fiction writer to create the idea of creating a computer-controlled world of sensory experience inside the brain was probably Vernor Vinge. In his 1981 novel True Names, he created the Portal.
A better-known instance of The Matrix is found in William Gibson's famous 1984 novel Neuromancer. He is the first (as far as I know) to use the word "matrix" to describe cyberspace, an internal experience of sensory-style data:
Finally, the movie-going public loved The Matrix, the film that popularized the notion of computer-created internal experience with full sensory experience.
...just as a daydreamer forgets his actual surroundings, and sees other realities, so Pollack drifted, detached, his subconscious interpreting the status of the West Coast communications and data services as a vague thicket for his conscious mind to inspect and interrogate for the safest path...
(Read more about the portal)
Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a customized cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination known as the matrix.
(Read more about cyberspace and the matrix)
(Red pill, blue pill ... brain beam, jack-in...)
Read other news sites; Sony patent takes first step towards real-life matrix and Sony patents brain beaming.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 4/7/2005)
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I might also be thinking of K-9 from Doctor Who.
