Google Glass can teach you Morse code in four hours without trying

If all that is meaningless to you, don’t worry. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found a way for humans to learn Morse code in four hours just by playing games.

The subjects were given Google Glass headsets  and continued to play games while vibrations near the ear slowly embedded subconscious Morsey goodness into their brains, 

At the end of a few hours of gaming and clandestine learning the subjects could type a sentence that used all the letters of the alphabet with a 94 per cent success rate. Linear typing of the alphabet in Morse reached a staggering 98 per cent hit rate.

Georgia Tech has pulled this kind of thing before, which it calls Passive Haptic Learning (PHL). Subjects have been taught Braille, how to play the piano and how to feel a hand again after a spinal injury.

The Google Glass is the perfect conduit as it has a speaker and a tapper already, so it was simply a case of writing the app.

A control group got the same vibrations, but weren’t given the aural cues as to what they meant. The test group had narrations of what each letter was, all the time while ignoring it and playing games.

"This research also shows that other common devices with an actuator could be used for passive haptic learning: your smartwatch, Bluetooth headset, fitness tracker or phone," said Professor Thad Starner, who runs the experiments alongside PhD student Caitlyn Seim.

"In our Braille and piano PHL studies, people felt vibrations on their fingers then used their fingers for the task. This study was different and surprising. People were tapped on their heads, but the skill they learned was using their finger."

This was the first time that an existing device was used for one of Starner’s experiments, as opposed to creating a bespoke gadget for the task.

Verizon published an entire blog post in Morse code last year because that’s how grown-ups chuck toys out of prams.

The next experiment aims to teach the full Qwerty keyboard by stealth. Other examples could include positive reinforcement techniques to break bad habits, learning foreign languages at night and hitting people on the side of the head with a lump hammer if they keep sniffing rather than using a tissue like a normal human being.