MOANA headset to make 'speed of thought' link between brains

The four-year project is being led by a team at Rice University in Texas as part of a wider DARPA-funded programme that is developing wearable interfaces for communicating with the brain.

“In four years, we hope to demonstrate direct, brain-to-brain communication at the speed of thought and without brain surgery,” said Rice’s Jacob Robinson, the lead investigator on the $18m project, which was announced on May 20, 2019 as part of DARPA’s Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program.

“Speed is key,” Robinson said in a statement. “We have to decode neural activity in one person’s visual cortex and recreate it in another person’s mind in less than one-twentieth of a second. The technology to do that, without surgery, doesn’t yet exist. That’s what we’ll be creating.”

Rice’s MOANA (magnetic, optical and acoustic neural access device) will test techniques that employ light, ultrasound or electromagnetic energy to read and write brain activity. Robinson said MOANA’s decoding and encoding technologies will employ viral vector gene delivery, a technology in clinical trials for treating macular degeneration. Genetic payloads, which differ for decoding and encoding, will be delivered with the help of ultrasound to select groups of neurons in 16 target areas of the brain.