A project on Kickstarter has been making the rounds today. Apparently a group of kids have managed to hook up an iPhone 4S to an Arduino board and then figured out how to control Siri with their mind — their mind — using ECG pads on their noggins and hooking it up to a 3.5mm headset jack on the iPhone 4S to send the mind bullets directly to the phone, via an iRig I might add.
I sat here, watched the four sample videos, and thought to myself “whoa, that’s pretty cool,” just like everyone else. Then it dawned on me — this just feels outright fake. It’s almost like they’re taking a page right out of the viral video playbook.
Take a look at this screeshot:
Does it look like the SpeakJet chip is actually wired up to anything? Anything at all? I’m no electrical engineer, but I have taken a couple of courses in college that let me prototype and breadboard a couple of fun little projects during lab time, so I’m fairly confident when I say that the chip is connected to absolutely nothing. Zip. Trust me. I tried to fake my way through a lab or two of my own.
Don’t believe it. In their own words, “it’s a little bit sketchy.” I wonder if the Project Black Mirror team is sitting there, laughing at all the journalists who they duped into publishing this video as fact. Moral of the story: Tech journalists aren’t engineers, even if they do try to play one on the Internet.
Via: TipB, 9to5Mac, and IntoMobile
