Prime Highlights:
- Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s company, Starfish Neuroscience, will release its initial brain-computer interface (BCI) chips by the end of 2025.
- The battery-free, wirelessly powered chips will be able to communicate with multiple regions of the brain at once.
Key Facts
- Starfish’s BCI chip only uses 1.1 milliwatts of power, lower than competitors such as Neuralink’s N1, which takes up about 6 milliwatts.
- The technology will find application in curing neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease by opening up multiple areas of the brain.
- The company is looking for partners in wireless power transmission, communication technologies, and tailored neural interfaces.
Key Background:
Gabe Newell, the CEO and co-founder of Valve Corporation, has been interested in the potential of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to transform human-computer interaction, especially in gaming, for a long time. In 2019, he started Starfish Neuroscience to venture into this field. The firm is now poised to reveal its first BCI chips later this year, 2025.
Starfish’s strategy relies on the development of minimally invasive, wireless, and battery-free neural interfaces. The chips are made to engage several areas of the brain at a time, something that might be required when treating intricate neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease, which affect various areas of the brain. The chips use only 1.1 milliwatts of power, so they are an energy-efficient choice against available technology such as Neuralink’s N1 chip.
The firm is looking for partnerships actively to take their technology to the next level, especially for wireless power transmission and communication system applications. They recognize that much development work is needed and are hiring talent and collaborators in an effort to meet their lofty ambitions.
Newell’s fascination with BCIs is nothing new. Valve has already tested incorporating BCIs into gaming, experimenting with things such as earlobe monitors for head-mounted virtual reality devices and working with OpenBCI to build open-source BCI software. Newell wishes to see BCIs come to transform gaming one day by modifying gaming experience based on people’s emotional state in real time or even stimulating the brain itself to create experiences.
Outside of gaming, Newell envisions uses for BCIs that enhance sleep, mood stability, and the treatment of mental illness. But he also acknowledges the ethics and security issues of directly linking the human brain, requiring that it be kept very tightly secure against the possibility of hacking or an unforeseen psychological side effect.
Forward-looking, Starfish Neuroscience is a major milestone in bringing neural technology and advanced medicine together with entertainment applications and has the potential to transform how humans engage with digital systems.
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