Hi Lazarus and Welcome Aboard!
I am not aware of such a system but the weird thing is that I actually sketched out the details for the exact system you have described with the exception of the battery. The technology doesn't exist, YET. Specifically the transmitter can't be made small enough to make it wireless and pass a whole lot of bandwidth, but it is very close. The tooth BJ posted is great proof of concept that the receive end can essentially be done now. You could do everything now if you didn't mind a cable sticking out of your head and the fact that the transmitter chips still have heat and power consumption problems. Power is going to be an issue too and there are no everlasting batteries out there now, but there are a few interesting solutions to this problem.
I told many friends about this design, so I wonder if you are possibly catching a friend of a friend... story. I'm a neuroengineering graduate student at Georgia tech, but I was previously in L.A, so the rumor may have spread from either there or Atlanta and mutated to include Japanese businessmen. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody else is thinking along these lines though as the potential applications of such a device are many. The military and intelligence communities would love to have this device.
I would eventually like to build a device that incorporates multiple sensory system I/O's to produce a true sensory VR stream. The visual system technology is still about ten years off and the other senses (vestibular, tactile, kinesthetic, olfaction, gustation, etc.) won't be far after that. There is going to be a serious bandwidth bottleneck for this system, but I'm hoping the telcom industry keeps up the pace!
Check out my
Neural Interfacing thread for further into on where the state of the art is. Right now it is focused on neuro chips, because that is what my grad work is on, but I'll add a section on artificial cochlea and artificial retina technology later today. Here is a teaser pic of an artificial cochlea from that post for you.
Best,
Ocsrazor
