Have you ever wondered how it feels to ‘listen’ to my face? Or how about colors splashing out in front of you while trance music plays on your iPod? No, these are not hallucinations or futuristic talk. It is the result of a beautiful experiment and all of it is actually happening as we speak.
Technology and innovation mimic the classic ‘chicken vs. egg’ debate. It is very difficult to ascertain what came first. Nonetheless, whether innovation begets technology or vice versa, both are needed in equal measure to accelerate growth of the human race. There have been several instances of relationships between these two, some clandestine while many not so much.
A cyborg (short for cybernetic organism) is a love child of such a union. Couple of years back, the mere mention of cyborgs would elicit a certain fear, perhaps due to their portrayal in movies like Star Trek and Terminator). However things are much different and better now thanks to Robert Downey Junior’s depiction of Iron Man!
In the simplest of definitions, a cyborg is any human fitted with some sort of computerized & physical attachment that enhances a bodily function. In that sense a pacemaker, contact lenses or even hearing aid are crude examples. But since these are only assistive technologies, they do not technically qualify. On a specific level, a robotic prosthetic attachment that overcomes certain cognitive or accidental disability is probably a better definition. It involves an advanced degree of (software controlled) human-computer interaction. Naturally this helps in better performance as well as automation of mundane tasks. And the most amazing aspect about being a cyborg is defying the aging process. In fact the older you get the better your senses will be as technology keeps improving day by day.
Neil Harbisson is a well known cyborg activist who has successfully developed an ability to ‘hear’ colors and overcome his color blindness. An artist, photographer and musician by training, colors were naturally vital to his life. But in the absence of suitable cure for his achromatopsia, his life was only colored in black and white. Cut to 2003, when he met Adam Montandon and worked with him to develop a prototype device which could be mounted on his head like an antenna. This ‘eyeborg’ was a sensor and webcam attached to a computer that picked up color frequencies and converted them into sound frequencies. These were transmitted through a pair of headphones. However it also meant lugging around the heavy laptop on his back as well as memorizing the frequencies of each color. Despite the shortcomings, this project in itself was a huge step forward for Neil.
Over the years, Neil came in contact with fellow visionaries like Peter Kese, who helped to improvise the eyeborg and made it perceive color saturation as well. Through this software, Harbisson was able to perceive up to 360 different hues and saturation by incorporating varying volume levels. The final breakthrough came about in 2009. Matias Lizana, another fellow student developed the eyeborg into a chip that could be implanted in the head. They also let go the need for headphones, mounting the chip to the back of Neil’s head, where it transmits the sound vibrations directly into his skull bones.
These improvisations helped Neil to shed the heavy 5-kg computer strapped to his body and also advanced the ability to hear colors that overstep the bounds of human perception (such as infrared and ultraviolet). This was coming of age for the cyborg community as well. Humans could now go beyond their natural abilities and analyze colors and sounds otherwise reserved for the animal kingdom. This not only helped to recognize reality in a better way but also connected him back to nature.
Through his eyeborg project, Neil has beautifully established the correlation between humans, colors and sound. He conceptualized ‘The Human Color Wheel’ which he defines as the varying shades of human skin. In a lovely metaphor aimed at quelling racism, Neil stated that ‘There are no white skins, and there are no black skins. Humans skins are of different shades of orange’. He then extended the concept through ‘Sound Portraits’ of people that are created by ‘listening’ to the colors of faces. Each face creates a different tone chord depending on its colors and Neil captures them on his canvas. In 2007, when Neil was hitch-hiking across Europe, he came up with an interesting proposition of finding the main colors of capital cities and titled it ‘City Colors’. He visited fifty countries and scanned each capital until he was able to represent each city with two main hues. No artist had even thought of such a creative take on geography ever before.
True to the spirit of innovation and social impact, Neil Harbisson then came up with the idea of creating the Cyborg Foundation in 2010. This was world’s first international organization dedicated to help humans become cyborgs. Neil, along with Moon Ribas envisioned the foundation as a means to extend human senses and abilities by creating and applying cybernetic extensions to the body. They are focused on defining and protecting cyborg rights, possibly even get them recognition (e.g. inclusion in identity documents such as passport).
The foundation freely distributes eyeborg software that translates color into sound. In addition, Neil also maintains a site, Eyeb.org, which explains how to the build the eyeborg antennas from off-the-shelf components. As his next dream project, he wants to utilize the eyeborg in helping blind people read, thereby reducing their dependency on Braille.
I’m really in awe of Neil Harbisson. Would I call him an extra-ordinary individual? Maybe. What I would definitely call him is a ‘visionary innovator’. He falls in the special category of people who differ from others due to their ability of gathering data using all five senses, and most importantly, combining it with their own experience to make ideas work. He has successfully demonstrated that innovation should be aimed at solving a real need or problem. Maybe his eyeborg project does not have mass scale applicability for treating color blindness yet. But his idea and concept can be extended to address gaps in many other areas. In doing so, technology would have created new markets which were hitherto unknown and unheard of.
P.S. I know what you are thinking after reading the article. Don’t waste your time on Google, here’s the video for you!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Sw_-pzYEqV4
(Franklin Templeton Investments partnered the TEDxGateway Mumbai in December 2012. This article is my entry for ‘The Idea Caravan’ contest on Indiblogger).