Week 5

This week one of the biggest event is probably the game Pokemon Go was launched. As an augmented reality game, it attracted massive amount of people in the world to play it. During the past several days, we have already observed decent amount of people walking with their phone trying to catch pokemons on the road. There were so many people playing at the same time that it has crashed the server several times per day in a row. Even though a lot of people think this is just a game and the technology involved were only some real-time camera tracking and GPS tracking, I was still really excited about this game not only just because I m a big Pokemon fan, but also as a student in biomedical engineering focusing on neuroscience.

The connection between the two might not be very obvious at first glance. However, I believe that AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) are the future in the next several decades for our life. Even though right now it attracts mainly entertainment industry such as for games and movies, AR and VR can be strong tools in medical field. The technology currently involved focused mainly on cameras and headphones to "trick" our senses that this is the "reality", but it cannot really be called a "reality" with only two senses involved (vision and hearing).  In order to incorporate other senses, the technology can no longer linger only on superficial stuff like better cameras or headphones. At some point, VR and AR technology would have to take in real understanding of neurons and how our brain interpret those electrical signals. Maybe in the future there will be machines that can directly send simulated information of all senses to our brain and we can even "live" in an virtual world.  The idea of sending direct electrical signals to the brain to simulate senses might make many people feel sick but the impact from it cannot be ignored. This technology would require scientists (neuroscientists to be exact) to understand how our brain incorporate electrical signals and decode them into information we need. And vice versa, it also requires us to understand how to encode the information (like an image, or a specific smell) into electrical signals and send to a specific region of the brain. If this is possible, it would save massive amount of people who suffered from certain disabilities like loss of vision or hearing. Instead of gathering donors for cornea, a camera is enough to send all the information of the world to the brain. Similar researches are actually currently conducted in certain universities and had certain level of success in terms of sending visual information to the brain or use pure thinking to control robotic hands to perform tasks. On the other hand, virtual reality technology can help people to observe some part of the world that they usually wouldn't have a chance to. For example, Dr. Shafi Ahmed decided that he was going broadcast the world first "virtual reality surgery" that used Oculus and recorded the surgery from a first-person point of view. From his words, VR technology would "radically change the way surgery was taught". For me, I really hope I can see the day that my grandparents can "travel" to everywhere in the world without actually stepping outside the home since they already don't have the physical strength to do it in real life.