Assignment : Real-Tech

5.  Review a TED video of your choice (not Ken Robinson), and include aminimum of 20 SAT words within your writing.  Underline them in bold. If you want to use more without sounding ridiculous, you are welcome to try.  Select them carefully before you write.

Required

Whenever Granny tells me how much she is confused of the high digital technology, I have been having this obsession that I should not be like that since I am a young adult who is living through the 21^st century. To be candid, I have felt the same way as Granny does. All I can do is to use my laptop to do my homework and get on Facebook, and my Android phone to text message my friends and play with game applications. Though people call my generation as the one that will lead the future world with enhanced science and technology, I have been indifferent and ignores about anything related to digital technology. That’s why I got really interested when I saw this laudable sixth-sense-technology idea by Pranav Mistry on Ted.com.

The main idea of Mistry was to combine the digital world and the real world by taking some objects from the real world into the digital world. This might seem quite obscure to understand by words, but it’s actually a very simple idea. For example, when you have a piece of paper, you get to put anything on there just by moving your fingers in the air. If you want to put a picture of your friend on it, you can just click the face and drag it superficially into the paper, in reality! What is even cooler is that you can even augment your friend’s face, using Photoshop, again with your fingers, on the paper itself. In the video, Mistry showed his own experience in decomposing his mouse(as a computer device) and made that into a cool device in which he put it on his hand, and when he did that, the motions of his hand was shown on the monitor as 3D motions. Actually, this kind of technology is used in action-movie film making process, such as the movie called Avatar.

While watching this video, I could remember my own example of digital-and-real-combined machine. I first thought of this idea when I was in fourth grade. I was doing my tedious math homework at the library and was very frustrated with some complicated questions. The answer sheet was too ambiguous for me to understand; I called my mom, whom I believed to be an innately perfect mathematician. However, I could not get any point through a phone call. I wanted someone next me to teach me whenever I wanted to.

At that time, I thought of a machine, which not only has a function of scanner and fax, but something that we can also write on it. What I mean by “writing” on it is different from just writing on a sheet of paper or typing on a laptop; it is a combination of both! If I put my math textbook on the machine, someone on the other side, such as my mom, can get the image of it and write on it through the machine. And when she does that, the things that she writes on the machine, is shown on my textbook automatically. Although I consider it to be one step lower than the idea of Mistry in a sense that I still thought of “machine”, where he thought of just combining the digital world and the real world directly with the objects themselves, the basic idea is quite similar. I was happy to hear Mistry being resolute about developing this kind of technology very soon, thinking I might be able to make my own machine that I have imagined long time ago, someday in a near future.

Another thing that flashed through my mind while watching the video was a novella by Bernard Werber, which I cannot remember the name of it. It was about a man who could get all the information of a person, on that person’s body, just by looking at it. Mistry had a similar example of this idea. When we look at an object, we get to know everything about it. For instance, when we have a train ticket, we get to know the pathway, delaying time, and everything. I was astonished while imagining how wonderful it would be to learn about all the things as soon as I see them. It would deter people from squandering their time by expediting their routines. The only problem that rose up to my head was the privacy issue. But I believe it would be innocuous if that function works only on objects, not human beings.

Overall, I was very impressed to find someone who is brilliant enough to not only get the idea, but also scrutinize objects near him and try some experiments on them. I loved how he had tons of examples to make it lucid. I almost revere Mistry now in a sense that he is not really planning to make any new machines, but is just simply trying to combine the digital world and the real world. It is not just an abstract idea of a crazy scientist anymore. It is more likely to be inevitable in a near future. I am looking forward to stare at some food in the cafeteria and get all the information about it very soon!