1.The Veldt
This story tells of a high-tech era, where children gradually regard machine technology as their parents, and abandon their real parents.
In the story, there is a mind-reading room in the nursery, which can show the scene exactly as you imagine it. It can control the temperature, humidity, smell and make people feel right there.
So I came up with the idea of “ Portal” . Place such machines (perhaps a room) around the world: they are able to record and transmit the local environment, temperature, humidity, oxygen levels, etc in real time. If I go in and choose where I want to go, the whole room can simulate the environment and adjust to where I want to go, maybe Africa, the Antarctic, maybe deep under the sea, mountains… As long as a place has the same machine, you can choose to “go” to those places, have a different experience, and complete a virtual tour.
I think the existing technology can accomplish this kind of design. For example, in order to train astronauts, we specially designed the simulation of the space environment, and some advanced VR equipment can already simulate the temperature and smell.
But I think there are some problems with this technology, too realistic simulation of the environment can be harmful. First of all, some people may not adapt to certain environments, such as overheating or too cold, which will cause problems if directly simulated. Secondly, virtual products may give people a kind of illusion, as expressed in the article, it is easy to make people confused between the real and the fake, resulting in a series of problems.
2.The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
The story exhibits a world “Omelas” , where there was no grief and sadness, but at the cost of losing a child’s happiness forever.
There’s no details about how to exchange people’s sadness and happiness in the article. But maybe we can find a method to analyze a person’s feelings and emotions, then provide a physical or mental way to solve some related problems.
I imagine a piece of software, when it looks at a person’s facial expressions, words and movements through a camera, it can accurately analyse his or her emotions to provide advice accordingly. For example, when the system senses a person’s sad emotion, it questions him to understand the cause of sadness, and makes use of big data analysis to give reasonable suggestions, which can effectively relieve his or her sad emotion.
Recently, facial recognition has been used more and more widely, whether to unlock your phone, authenticate your identity, or even replace manual payments in some applications. There is also a lot of research on facial expression analysis, and I found a project on the website that matches the first part of my idea: 《情绪·元灵》(Yoooooon. (2022, September 22). 《情绪·元灵》. MANA.
https://m.manamana.net/video/detail/2003565#!zh)
This work of art uses an artificial intelligence program to read the emotional data in the facial micro-expression, and translates the audience’s current thoughts and emotional states into the emotional element spirit in the virtual world in real time. It analyzes people’s emotions by recognizing their facial expressions.
But there are some drawbacks of my idea. Can a machine really fully understand human emotions based on big data alone? If the analysis goes wrong, the advice given can backfire.
3.THE PLAGUE
The story pictured an era when human beings are attacked and petrified by a kind of virus. In the story, petrified people become another form of life, still conscious, but only moving at a very slow speed.
Is there a way to “resurrect” what we call “substance”? Such as some ancient relics, some underground ore. If we had a technology that could analyze the traces of a substance to infer its experience, to tell its story, then we could learn about a new different form of life. With such interactive artifacts, we could even tell the story of a rock found by a river.
Now we can observe ancient relics, by analyzing the different matter covered on it, to speculate its age, its use. I also found a way of telling the story of the ancient relics on the Internet: Arche-Scriptures – Our digital traces in the future-past.
“Created by Alberto Harres at HfK Bremen, ‘Arche-Scriptures‘ explores ceramics as a possible medium to store digital information. An artifact found at a speculative archeological dig-site is being scanned by a decrypting machine, through which the visitor is invited to listen as the original audio data engraved onto the ceramics is slowly retrieved and sonified. The experience offers a glimpse on a possible future past, it speculates on the future of our digital traces through an ancestro-futuristic perspective, provoking a discussion about continuity, preservation and archiving.” (Harres, A.& Bremen,H. (2022, January 8). Arche-Scriptures – Our digital traces in the future-past.Creativeapplications.
The project used technology to translate the past story to an original audio. It will be more amazing if one day a more advanced technology enables us to know the story of all the things around us.