Learning how to play a guitar (a real one, mind) is a pain in the ass. Few of the population have the requisite hand-eye coordination needed to go beyond the requisite do-re-mi plucking. But what if there was a device that could teach you how to play a musical instrument by possessing your hand and showing you how it’s done? That’s the premise of PossessedHand, a project being developed jointly by the University of Tokyo, Japan, and Sony Computer Science Laboratories which electrically stimulates your muscles to move the fingers of your arm. Test subjects report that they’re able to sense the movement of their fingers and hands, even while their eyes were closed. The test subjects, of course, found the whole experience unsettling. “I felt like my body was hacked,” said one.
Aside from the obvious benefits to budding musicians, the device will one day be able to rehabilitate people who have suffered strokes or other injuries that has impaired muscle control. The ability of the device to produce finer motor movements is leaps and bounds over the crude electro therapy that currently exists today. We’ve embedded a video of a demonstration below.
Source: New Scientist