Star Trek Tech

 

Back in 2006 I attended the Star Trek exhibition at the London Science Museum (here’s a photo of part of the exhibit).

It wasn’t just some nerdy event (!) but also a way of demonstrating how far we have come in meeting the challenges of creating the kind of Science Fiction tech that we see in Star Trek. At the time it was pretty impressive, from the medical through to communication and analysis tech we had come a long way. However the world has moved forward since then obeying Moores Law quite accurately.

I was therefore interested last week to see that they now invented a ‘cloaking device’  - the first step on the path to a 3-D invisibility cloak. Cool. So here are some others…

Start Trek                                                    Equivalent

1. “Phaser to Stun”                                        Tazer

2. “Phaser to Kill”                                           Laser guided weapons

3. ”Communicator”                                       Mobile phone

4. ”Tricorder”                                                  Mobile Phone or PDA

                                     (possibly with Sciencescope attachments)

5. “Medical Tricorder”                                 MRI scanner

6. Holodeck                                              3-D holographic projection

                            (immersion suits, immersive VR environments)

7. Replicator                                                   Replicator (3-D) Printers

8. Universal Translater                               iPhone app

                                                            or Phraselator (U.S. Military tech)

9. Scalpel Free surgery                               Laser surgery

10. Jordy’s visor                                            digital cameras and

                                                           tongue devices help blind see.

11. Communicator earpiece                      Bluetooth headset

12. Force Field                                                Plasma bubble

We live now in the world inspired by the Science Fiction depicted in the early Star Trek. I hope however that as we ‘boldly go’ forward we continue to explore the macro as well as the micro and to be pushing outwards as well as exploring the inward workings of our world. I worry that we’re using technology as a crutch for everyday living rather than as tools to project us to new and rewarding (off world?) experiences.

Bio Feedback Technology

We’ve just purchased a set of Bio feedback technology that has been used by other research to look specifically at emotional responses to gaming. The product is ProComp Biograph Infniti and we’ve bought it with a number of different sensors to pick up things such as  Surface Electromyography, Skin Conductivity and EKG heart rate monitoring.

This rich data can be provided alongside other types of data and we’re therefore going to use it with our purpose built Research Labs along with eye tracking technology and other video data that we capture during our testing work. This should allow us to get a much more detailed picture of the level of engagement and immersion within game play and indeed other forms of online interaction such as within virtual worlds and other online web environments. I’m really looking forward to trying it out. We’ve got plans to also extend this work beyond the labs themselves so we can look at monitoring people in their own social contexts and seeing if this makes a difference.

We are also considering developing a joint research bid with the Speckled Computing people again extending the work we do in the labs out into the real world and looking at how to use the ‘intant feedback’ that this technology provides to assist people in both how they work and in their personal and social lives. I’m very excited about the possibilities that these technologies provide.  

Some quick example or two to explain what I mean.

1. We can use Bio feedback to assist people in dealing with stressful situations and conflict. We can use VR or video simulations to mock up events and work through issues with individuals in a ‘controlled’ way, for example training social workers.

2. We can use Bio feedback and speckled computing at assist with rehabilitation, and with improving balance in people who have mobility issues, for example those who have had hip replacement surgery to learn to walk correctly again and improve freedom of movement.

3. We can assist with pandemic outbreaks by sending ‘specks’ to affected people to gauge whether or not they have the illness and to monitor their recovery. This avoids having to involve expensive health care practitioners and it also allows us to accurately measure the spread of a pandemic.

There are many more, Sports Science, Gaming etc.. the possibilities are many and varied and the opportunity for using this technology to benefit our society is very much within our grasp.

What I did in my holidays (mind control)

I’ve had a break from blogging but no bad thing really as I wanted to get my head around some technology both of the traditional variety and of the IT sort. I’ve been reading the mind control headsets articles with interest. In particular BBC Focus magazine did two articles in the last edition relating to gaming and future tech. One was to do with the Olympics in the future and things like augmented reality, wearable technology to enhance athletes performance, bionics, and simulation. Interestingly the Korean team used simulation gaming combined with sports psychology as a method to train from Archery and similar ‘repetitive’ type sporting activities during the 2008 Olympics earlier this year and this seemed to be proven as a good method of learning to perform better (tuning you brain to practise and achieve results then the body will follow). This is also a method adopted by F1 drivers to practise racing around circuits, they use a PS2 and then learn the right breaking points and entry to corners etc. before actually getting in the car.

I bought myself a compound bow to take up archery again after a long break and I was amazed at how many new gadgets are available to enhance the archer and improve the shot, when I did target archery as a kid it was a much simpler sport in many ways and I think that technology does give an advantage and improve the shot but I had a lesson from the three times world compound bow champion over the summer and he is very much into the psychology of the sport and made us shoot blind (using the ‘afterburn’ image of the target gold to find our shot). This was very interesting and a quick way of training our brains into ‘knowing’ the gold and blocking out all other visual distractions.

So back to mind headsets, two are coming out next year by all accounts, the EPOC which is the gaming one and should be very interesting to try out and there’s another one which is going to be used more for interactive T.V. work, where the headset will pick up moods and adjust the programming to suit you. (I told male friends about this one and they were all concerned that the T.V. would constantly be flicking to the porn channels!). I guess we’ll need to wait and see how good it is at getting moods and also at dealing with situations with multiple users (with different moods!).

Anyhow I’ve been up to checking out several eBook readers (iliad and BeBook) and we have the Sony eBook on order so I’ll blog about them soon…then there’s Spore which has just been released I could say a lot about that but I’ll save it for another blog! - Lots of exciting new stuff coming online now so I’m setting myself up for month of exploration.

Web 3.0 – I don’t think so.

I’ve been reading several articles recently about the semantic web including one in last week’s Computing magazine. The article cited Tim Burners-Lee as espousing the benefits of the semantic web for the past decade and now it seems some progress is being made, albeit in small areas.

The latest to roll off the shelf is Powersets semantic search service. It searches wikipedia only at the moment but is set to go further soon. Importantly it searches via conversational techniques and is supposed to provide a more intuitive experience. So this is the future of the web, already being tagged web 3.0.

I was rather hoping that web 3.0 would be a little more than a sensemaking tool, not that it’s not useful but I imagined web 3.0 to include neural interfacing and total immersion, webTV and augmented reality. Speaking of which I saw the bionic eye technology (actually a bionic contact lens) being developed in Seattle by UoW. They showed a working demo of the technology in action on a recent episode of click.

Mans work…

I’ve been enjoying a week off work this week, the weather has been lovely and I’ve been out in the garden cutting down trees, rolling my sleeves up and getting on with lots of jobs that need doing. It’s very refreshing and I’ve even managed to keep away from technology for a while.

I did however sneak a look at the new Google Earth offering (as it’s not anything to do with work as such). This one could very well blow my mind. My father-in-law loves google earth and was zooming in on my new house before we’ve even moved in and was telling me all about the size of my plot compared to my neighbours (it’s a bit larger) and how the road goes down to the local church etc. He is almost obsessed by it and spends most days google ‘unearthing’ (tm?) facts about places we’ve been to on holiday or places we may possible go in the future…

That leads me back to the new bit of Google Earth which is that you can now do a search of the sky and you’ll get some very precise charts showing you how the sky looks from your location. You can do other fab things like searching for different start systems or constellations and you can zoom and even track the movement of different planets through a time period to see where they’re going to be. It’s a fantastic looking tools. I’ve only just downloaded it and I’m looking forward to playing with it. I’m not much of a star gazer myself but Jordan really loves the stars and we’ve just bought him a telescope so this will be the perfect tool to accompany that.

Arthur C Clark and Bletchley Park…

There is no connection between Arthur C Clark and Bletchley Park other than they’re both in my thoughts at the moment. I’m reading one of Clarks books at the moment (Times Eye) and I still find him to be one of the best SF authors around. He understood the science, in a similar way to Asimov, which really helped him to predict or at least imagine how things might progress. Clark predicted communications satllites, space shuttle, super-computers etc. and inspired others. In 1940 he predicted that we’d reach the moon by the year 2000 an idea dismissed by others at the time. He said he never patented his idea for satellites because he never thought it would happen in his lifetime. I think these things happended directly as a result of him and his like. He inspired people to go out and make these things happen.

Bletchley Park is an inspirational place to visit. It’s a nerd heaven with the first computational device ever invented and a slate statue of Alan Turing (the father of computing) who worked there during the war. Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond)also worked there and during our short escorted tour we met the guy who has spent the past twelve years restoring the computer (Colossus) back to working order.  He did it using drawings and photos as all the original scematics were distroyed. All the valves are taken from ex-telecom exchanges and some of them date back to the second world war themselves. His anecdotes were my favourite part of the tour. he decribed the inventiveness that the code breakers used to decypher the messages passed by the Germans and the crazy ideas they came up with to try to capture a cypher machine. Ian Fleming had an idea of flying a German plane back to Germany pretending to be returning from a raid, crash it in a strategic place and then once there remove a device and return to England. It was decided that that idea was too risky but may others like it were tried. The way they cracked the codes is fantastic too. I went there with the delegates from the Microsoft Silverlight event, these people are some of todays IT industry experts but when we visited Bletchley Park my colleagues and I shared a sense that the real inventiveness took place all those years ago and we are just a pale shadow of that. Bletchley Park is the proof that necessity breeds invention.

Morph (nanotechnology)

I’m not sure if this will interest anyone apart from myself but I do feel that some of the nanotech research taking place is leading us in a very interesting direction. Take the Nokia funded Morph project for example, I’ve read several articles about it including the one I’ve linked to which comes from the BBC website. In other articles there’s talk about the sensory and morphing stuff being only a matter of about seven years away and the nanolectronics (the ability to get power directly from the environment in new and interesting ways) being possible within 11 years. These could even be conservative estimates with the rate of change. I’ve said before that if they could crack the ‘ambient power’ issue with mobile devices and also get ‘always on’ mobile networking totally cracked then things like electronic paper become much more desirable objects. (there’s a lot of if’s there) – but I think it’s only a matter of time.

I also saw a nice quote today from  SF writer William Gibson  “the future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed”

Aliens, Wifi and nasties…

Three odd things happened in the past few days (well probably more but three that I’m aware of) – Firstly a report I read in the Independent from a senior medical advisor to the UK government saying that wifi could be as dangerous to people as asbestos. This has sparked a huge debate with many people saying that there’s no proof of any issues. In May the BBC reported that scientists had concluded there were no health risks.

Secondly there is a report out this week proving that there are no short term health issues associated with the use of mobile phones for adults however there may be a risk over a long term (the report didn’t cover children who may be at higher risk) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6990958.stm

 Thirdly a meteorite fell in Peru and caused a mystery illness http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,,2171920,00.html

Where does this leave me? – I don’t know what’s killing me. Last year I was told banana’s (one of my favourite foods) cause cancer. I think that almost everything is carcinogenic and that perhaps scientists should spend a lot more time researching things, but more importantly the media shouldn’t pounce on one persons opinion or unpublished papers and tout them as proof. It’s highly irresponsible.

I’m off to my bunker now to escape from all these rays!