Group Research Reading
The Veldt：
To summarize, the story mainly talks about an era of developed technology where children increasingly regard machines as their parents and abandon their real ones.
Depicted in the story, there is a mind-reading room in the nursery that shows the scene align with the patient’s imagination, as well as regulating the temperature, humidity and smell in order to make people feel right in their imagination world.
Thus, an idea dawned upon me that maybe I can design a kind of specialized outfit that is able to record the temperature, humidity, lightings, sounds, sight and etc. of the surrounding, and replicate them in another place with totally different environment. For example, when I am travelling to the Yellow Stone National Park in the United States and I find the scene and the breeze very comfortable to me, then I can use the outfit device to record the surrounding so that when I return to my home country and want to experience it again, I can wear the outfit and let it output what it has previously record to simulate the surrounding. That must be very romantic.
Then I have done some research and find that this design can be implemented using the existed technology. VR glasses, for example, are able to simulate the surrounding sights in a realistic way. Additionally, special outfits, like what firefighters or astronauts wear, can detect outside temperatures and pressure. Maybe they are of some use.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas:
In summary, the story mainly talks about a philosophic dilemma where the citizens in the whole city live in peace and pleasure at the cost of a little girl suffering forever in the course of her life. (ps: I am kind of interested in this philosophic topic, but it isn’t relevant to the course)
I think it will be a good idea to externalize the girl’s sufferings into a kind of signal in order to remind the citizens of what the happiness stems from. Then maybe more citizens will stop taking their happy life for granted, and do something in order to alleviate the little girl’s suffering.
I’ve come up with an idea that perhaps a device can be designed to identify a person’s facial expressions and evaluate the degree of his or her happiness or suffering. The higher the person’s extent of happiness is valued in the software, the greener light the device will omit. On the contrary, the higher the person’s extent of suffering is valued in the software, the redder light it will omit.
Nowadays, there are many kinds of software designed by huge companies to detect people’s facial traits and observe their expressions based on AI learning and huge database. Maybe these kinds of technology can be applied to implement the design.
However, the problem is that most of the facial expression detecting software, in a sense, is digital input, whereas my objective is to make a device that can detect the degree of one’s happiness or sadness, which is analog input. I think that might be a hard nut to crack and need further research.
The Plague:
The story basically described an epoch when human beings are infected by a silico-based virus and are gradually petrified. Petrified people become another form of life, still conscious, but only move at a very slow speed.
It occurred to me that maybe a kind of interactive device can be devised in an attempt to act as a smart gateway that detects whether the person walks through it carries virus, and if he or she is infected, the gateway will be closed, or else it keeps open.
I think the technology of “health QR code” in Wechat and Alipay in China is of good use. It serves as a profile of an individual recording whether he or she is infected by a certain virus. Perhaps the code can be used as the input of the gateway.
But the problem is that, how can the gateway keeps checking a person’s QR code? If one doesn’t bring his or her mobile phone, does that mean that the gateway will be rendered as useless because there’s nowhere for the machine to receive the information of QR code. I think maybe a better way of detection is awaiting for us to discover.