Kevin’s nervous system over the Internet

This is me in Columbia University, New York and what we did was put my nervous system onto the Internet, live, and it had an IP address. We didn’t tell people what we were doing because we thought there’s a few hackers, particularly in New Zealand, and they would probably get onto the Internet and start calling up my address, saying “Hey we’re moving his hand around. Look at that.”

So what we actually did was I moved my hand in New York, my neural signals went across the Internet back to the UK to move the robot hand, so my brain signals were operating the robot hand on a different continent, not only that but the robot hand has fingertip sensors on it and the finger tip sensors, the output from those was fed back across the Internet to New York and played down onto my nervous system. Ah, result of which was I could feel what the robot hand was feeling in terms of how much force the hand was applying on a different continent.

I was wearing a baseball cap with ultrasonic sensors on it. In the experiment the output from the ultrasonic sensors was fed down to stimulate my nervous system. So with a blindfold on I could move around and detect objects. Ah, I didn’t know what they were but I could move around and not bump into objects. Essentially if I got close to an object I was receiving lots and lots of current pulses. Ding ding ding ding ding. If there was no object nearby, the current pulses died away. So I know what it’s like to have an extra sense.