“Minority Report” – Movie’s impact

Today, sometimes science fiction shown in movie gives an idea to develop a new technology. May be some of you remember the Minority Report scenes in which Tom Cruise and others use their hands to manipulate data on giant computer screens…

One man is on a mission to bring that gestural interface technology to every personal computer. A famous scientist, John Underkoffler (the founder and chief of Oblong Industries) give a sign by saying “The mouse has had a good run, but it’s time to say good-bye”. His company has an operating system, based on human hand gesturing, that enables the user to explore in a 3D plane. The system responds to the pitch, roll and yaw movements that come naturally to the hand and works with cameras that track the positions of targets placed on gloves.

Indeed, he was inspired by his work as the science and technology adviser to Steven Spielberg for the film Minority Report. The team created the futuristic Washington headquarters portrayed in the film. When it came to the gestural interface, the production team’s research and development came just shy of actually building it.

Sometimes the filmmakers–the science fiction writers–imagine stuff before the engineers do, and there is a feedback loop between fiction and science that seems to be influencing each others.

 

Deja Vu

Two days ago, I wacthed Deja Vu movie starred by Denzel Washington and directed by Tony Scott. The technology of time machine which is used by the ATF agent in this movie to simulate and even change the past amazed me. As not many details can be found in the movie, I search a little bit about Deja Vu.

Deja Vu is a psychological phenomenon which describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed a new situation previously. May be some of us have ever feel such unexplained phenomenon. Frankly I do not know whether the feeling that something is happened in the past like in the movie is real. Anyhow, this reminds me of a physics class I attended in Bachelor study about energy conservation. It means an energy is remained constant and only transformed to another form of energy.

I wonder that if we can catch the energy that people used in the past, then it may be simulated to see what happen in the past or even to manipulate it. What kind of technology !!!! May be somebody can inform me whether that technology is already available now, to prove the Deja Vu is a really situation that exist or it is just illusion, because sometimes I also had the same experience.