The Veldt
“And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.”
A slow motion mirror: like all the normal mirrors, the mirror reflects the objects infront of it identically. However, it is also able to capture the change of the image and all the movements in a certain space in front of it, and presents the movements and changes on its specular surface, but at a rather slow speed. The precise rate can be random or controllable. Also the reflection on the mirror can delay for seconds and gradually fade away. This is easy to remind us of the current technique like slow motion instant replay in sport events or the distorting mirror.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
“In the middle category, however–that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.– they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it. “
A button on the handle of a badminton racket: when we press the button, a controller of the racket strings receives a “loose” message to loosen the strings to a certain degree. To process and respond to the information, the elasticity of the strings gets reduced so that the speed of the shuttle slows down. If we press the button again, the strings get tightened. To be more specific, in a badminton game, it can be difficult to quickly switch a strong smash into a light drop shot, and the movement before the strike can be easily seen through by the other player. However, with this device by simply pressing the button, even one’s movement is actually a full swing, the loosen strings can slow down the speed of the shuttle and complete a drop shot, which seems to be a tricky deception. This can be compared to the trick toys and can enable people who don’t have a perfect badminton technique to enjoy a fun game.
Problem：
- It is designed just for fun and can never be used in regulation games or it will be considered as cheating!!
The Plague
“I returned to my residence and encountered her gaze at the threshold. It had changed. Maybe it was my imagination, but I no longer found loathing in her eyes—if stone eyes could emote anything at all.”
According to the description of the woman’s expression, we can design an interactive system based on human specific microexpression. The system is designed to capture human’s facial expression, and after processing the expression information, respond to the human. For example, by adopting the artifact to the medical system, patients can get more convenient service. If a patient, lying on bed and not able to walk around or reach someplace far from him, sneezes, the sneeze can be recorded.Then the patient can quickly receive a piece of tissue paper handed by a machanical arm. In other situations, for instance, if a handicapped, who has to be sitting in a wheelchair, needs to get a book from the bookshelf, he can move his eyes over the spines of the book and pick one by blinking twice. Locating the eyesight, the installation can hand over the book to the person. This is similar to Zach Lieberman’s project Eyewriter, which follows the movements of an eyeball and record the track on the screen of a computer.
Potential Problems:
- The microexpression is hard to precisely detect, and easy to be mistakenly tunderstood.
- The information conveyed by facial expression is limited.