From Science Fiction to Technology Reality

In AI (Artificial Intelligence), an advanced humanoid replaces a son for a despondent couple.  Their son is in a coma, and there is no telling when, or if, he'll wake up.  As deft drama would have it, however, that son does reawaken and soon pits himself against his robotic playmate.  

Atti is more of a cute playmate, then a parent replacement.  Busy parents will sometimes plant their young children in front of the TV, while they do things around the house.  So Atti can preoccupy the little ones better than TV, because it can interact intelligently.   

In the classic Terminator, the cyborg is sent back from the future to the present to kill the lady, who bore a son, who was to become a revolutionary leader.  The cyborg, superbly cast as Arnold Schwarzenegger, that is, before a huge road fire stripped him of his flesh, is all metal, mechanics, and intelligence in the final scene.  

Walking like a cyborg is no small feat, and no fiction, for Michael Gore.  This is not new technology, or at least the concept isn't new.  But perhaps we're closer, yet, to using robotics to help us walk or otherwise navigate our lives, post-injury.  

A Virtual Retina Display, eh.  Our retina becomes a screen in how I imagine the old projection TV functioned.  It's super-intriguing.

Denzel Washington, in the film Déjà Vu

In one of the most awesome, mind-bending scenes in Déjà Vu, Washington is chasing after a terrorism suspect, who is in the past and in the midst of activities leading up to his bombing of a passenger-full ferryboat.  The high tech glasses permit Washington, who is in the present, to go mobile time-travel, that is, outside the control room, and thus pursue the suspect to cut short his activities. 

So can the Virtual Retina Display peer into the past or into the future?  

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD