Creepiest recent news

But of course it has such great potential and is perfectly innocent and what's more, it can have wonderful humanitarian benefits! Or so some folks in this New Scientist article from August 10 tell us:

By remotely stimulating a person's vestibular system - the fluid-filled tubes in the inner ear that guide their sense of balance - with electrodes placed on the skin just below the ear, researchers at NTT's research laboratories in Kanagawa[, Japan,] have found a way to turn humans into oversized radio controlled vehicles.

The technique, known as galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS), unbalances a person so that they automatically veer left or right in an attempt to rebalance themselves. The NTT team developed a headset and a control unit similar to that used with remote-controlled toy cars.

The research project went on public display at the 2005 SIGGRAPH, in Los Angeles, US from 2 August. Volunteers were given a chance to experience GVS and, to the amusement of other visitors, were seen careening around the show floor under demonstrators' control.

The developers say the primary use would be to add an illusion of real motion to a computer game. James Collins, an expert in GVS at Boston University, said it might have a medical use in helping patients with an impaired sense of balance.

I, of course, started thinking about the ways this could be misused: The article only refers to people going left or right under the control of this device, but balance also involves forward and backward. So if you can make someone turn left by making them feel they're off-balance to the right, can you make them move forward by making them feel they're falling backward? If so, you could hypothetically take some unwilling person, surgically implant the electrodes, and them force them to walk wherever you wanted them to.

Admittedly, that may not be realistic; the people who demonstrated the effects were volunteers uninterested in fighting the experience. It might be easy or at least possible to overcome it with conscious effort and an unwilling participant could possibly defeat the intent, if not the feeling, by dropping to their knees and then to the ground. Still, the idea of radio-controlled people creeps me out.