According to foreign media reports, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he wants to create a wearable device that can read brain waves to “control virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR).”

It may also reveal what you are thinking.

After Facebook bought CTRL-Labs in September 2019, Facebook founder Zuckerberg recently revealed that he intends to focus on wearable devices and implant technology with brain control.

The Chan Zuckerberg BioHub Research Center, funded by Zuckerberg and his wife in Silicon Valley, said that the ultimate goal of brain technology development is to enable people to think and control through virtual reality or augmented reality head-mounted devices. Freedom in your mind.

CTRL-Labs is working on a wristband device that allows people to control signals from the spinal cord. After the transaction is completed, CTRL-labs will join Facebook Reality Labs, which is working on augmented reality smart glasses.

If technology companies really want to read brain waves, implant technology seems to be a must. From a medical perspective, a speech-limited disease such as a stroke could indeed be decoded by implanted technology to turn internal speech into a voice that people can understand in real time. However, there are also health risks.

In fact, since the establishment of “Building 8” in Facebook in 2016, the company has already been engaged in the development of brain computing technology. In July 2019, Facebook revealed that it had been funding the University of California to assist in the development of brain computing.

A paper published by the University of California pointed out that it developed a software that only had to be trained. 76% of the software could identify the problems heard by people with epilepsy, and 61% knew what epileptics wanted to know. Of course, the brain-reading software developed by the project is only applicable to pre-programmed sentences, but scientists believe that the software also lays a good foundation for the development of a more powerful system in the future. On the whole, it takes a long way to go to commercialize reading brain technology.

Most worrying, once the brain technology is commercialized, it could invade people’s privacy. Facebook believes that even if the future brain-reading technology matures, its application will be greatly restricted, so it will not invade personal privacy.