Neuralink chip gives second patient the ability to play Counter-Strike 2
The second patient to receive the Neuralink chip has already been able to use the chip to play Counter-Strike 2 on PC .
Neuralink chip gives second patient the ability to play games
Elon Musk's Neuralink on Wednesday provided an update on the condition of Alex, a man who lost control of his limbs after a spinal cord injury. He received the brain chip last month and has since been using the chip to remotely control a computer mouse on his laptop.
Alex also uses the Neuralink chip to play his favorite PC games like Counter-Strike 2. Previously, Alex had to use a mouth-operated controller, called a QuadStick, to play the first-person shooter. But even then, the controller limited him to only being able to move or aim his weapon one at a time, not all at once like a Counter-Strike player who can move fully.
In other words, Alex had to switch between mouse and keyboard functions while playing, but thanks to the Neuralink chip he can now aim his weapon using the chip, and move at the same time using the QuadStick.
“Just running around the game is so much fun because I can look from side to side, I don’t have to move the Quadstick left or right, I can [think where I want to] look and it goes where I want it to go, it’s crazy,” Alex said in a post on the Neuralink blog about the Neuralink chip. The company posted a video showing Alex using the chip to play the game, showing him shooting one robotic enemy and then shooting another from afar, all with relative ease.
In addition to gaming, Alex also uses the chip to develop 3D designs in CAD software. This included creating a custom holder to hold the power supply for his Neuralink chip, which was then 3D printed. In the blog post, Neuralink also addressed an issue the company encountered when placing the chip in Arbaugh, its first patient. Although the surgery was successful, about 85 percent of the thread-based electrodes attached to his brain later became unstable, impairing the chip’s full potential to read neural signals.
Although Arbaugh could still use his chip effectively, Neuralink wanted to avoid a repeat of that with Alex. In response, the company developed several “mitigations,” including reducing the chance of an air pocket forming during surgery and placing the chip deeper into the brain tissue. “We hopefully did not see any suture pullout in our second participant,” the company said of Alex.
It's not clear whether Alex's chip is superior to Arbaugh's brain chip, but in the meantime Neuralink says it's working on ways to improve the controls on the technology "to provide full mouse and video game controller functionality."
“In addition, we plan to enable Link [the brain chip] to interact with the physical world, allowing users to feed themselves and move more independently by controlling a robotic arm or their wheelchair,” the company said.
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