Film Theory: Controlling Robots with YOUR MIND! (Disney's Big Hero 6)

In 2014, Big Hero 6 fast-forwarded us to the year 2150, to see a world where science is practically magical. Between Honey Lemon's chemistry lab in a bag capable of summoning all the elements of the periodic table, Tomago's electromagnetic skates, and Baymax's cutting-edge diagnostic technology, whichever way you look at it, Disney's vision of the future! is full of technological fantasies beyond our wildest imaginations! Which makes it even more

mind

-blowing to me that 136 years later, in the midst of all this, we're still using iPhones. "Everyone say Hiro!" "Hiro!! " Hello Internet! Welcome to Film Theory!! As soft as Baymax. (Not that useful, though...) So the other day I was compulsively buying a bunch of Disney movies on Google Play, since Disney is launching their own Netflix-style subscription service next year, and I hope they make all of them

your

purchases.

Unpurchasable movies to force everyone to subscribe to this, and I simply can't stand another subscription service in my life! Why can't I just own the things I'm paying for? Oh! Millennial angst speaking. And already movies like Cinderella, The Little Mermaid and Aladdin aren't available, which is just sad. I just want to have a movie... :'( T ʖ̯ T Anyway, like I was saying, this binge session made me revisit a bunch of Disney movies that I kind of overlooked or skimmed through the first time I saw them and One of those movies was Big Hero 6! And you know what stood out?

Not just the impressive futuristic technology, but also its sheer volume and variety! An inflatable medical robot, plasma weaponry, and a deadly spinning exosuit. signs! By far the coolest thing or things we see in the movie are these: Our main character, Hiro (that's Hiro with a H-I-R-O, not to be confused with Big Hero 6 H-E-R-O from the movie title) invents deceptively simple

robots

that, when their powers are combined, can practically do anything. The technology is so innovative that it does the impossible: it impresses everyone at the science fair (☆ ͜ʖ ☆) which, let's be honest: it's the fair. Anything beyond “I dropped my teeth and soda and made them dissolve” will be impressive, let alone “I invented a technology that will revolutionize robotics.” These mic

robots

will draw the attention of our villain, which appears to be one." Straight out of Fortnite Season 5, and he ends up stealing the technology to achieve victory royale number one.

Anyway, this whole thing made me wonder: Could a technology How will this really work? Will I be able, at some point in the next one hundred and thirty-six years, to control a swarm of microrobots using only my

mind

to, I don't know, do anything that microrobots controlled by

your

mind do? a smoothie! Film theorists, start warming up those triptych boards now, because today we're going to look at Hiro's winning science fair project and teach you how to steal what he did to get an A-plus. of modern robotics. Why is it always a triptych board? Are those things not used for anything else?

The way Hiro presents these things in the movie makes him look like a reincarnated Steve Jobs, showing us the iPhone 70, now with even fewer features and faster planned obsolescence. But looking beyond Hiro's height, what exactly would it take to invent the microbots we see in the movie? I think it could be divided into three clear components. One: Microrobots are small and are all capable of moving independently. Two: Microrobots are capable of moving in a coordinated manner and hundreds, or even thousands, of them act together in response to a single command. And finally, here's trick number three: microbots are controlled by the user's mind through a neural interface.

Think about it and it happens. "The microbots are controlled by this neurotransmitter. I think what I want them to do they do." And we have to do all of that within the next one hundred and thirty-six years. Do you think it can be done? Place your bets now in the comments and then rewatch this video in 2150 and tell me if he's right. I'll just be hanging in my stasis pod waiting to be revitalized by then. So, you know, I'll look for a little excitement first. The size of the microbots, as you can guess from the name.

Individually, very small looking. less than an inch long and it turns out that this is completely possible not only in the future but right now in 2018 as you watch this video, in fact real world robotics actually become much smaller than what Hiro showed in the past. In 2005, scientists were creating robots that were literally called micro robots because they were only 60 micrometers wide and 200 micrometers long, so small that you would need a microscope to see them move like a

hero

if your robots are not small enough for their length. to be measured in micrometers Maybe you should consider giving them a different name like Mile BOTS or Senti Bots.

It's not as catchy, but it's certainly more accurate. Truth in advertising, my friend. Okay, these real-world micro robots are a far cry from the micro robots we see in the movie, these 60 micrometer robots, they can move like a worm, but they're not very useful. So a better question would be: could you actually do something useful? Robot as small as the microbots in Big Hero 6, the answer is once again surprising: Yes. In 2015, Harvard scientists unveiled the Robobe, a drone whose body is shorter than the diameter of a penny, a unlike microrobots, which seemed more like an experiment.

To just see how small they could make the technology, Robo bees are actually small for a specific reason, a small size allows them to fly more easily and they are so light that they can cling to surfaces like a real bee wood. Using static electricity it also has the really nifty feature of carrying a tiny camera, meaning it has real world applications, it's the world's smallest spy drone. Think about that the next time you feel a bug land on your neck. Maybe it's not an angry hornet coming to sting you. In your flesh maybe it's just some foreign government that wants to take really close-up pictures of the inside of your ear, suffice it to say that Hiro's microbots in size are solidly in the territory not only possible in the year 2115, but in Actually they already did it in 2015 Well, then it is one thing to make a small robot, but another completely different is to have a complete swarm of robots that are capable of moving together and this is not as simple as having a bunch of micro robots and say Everyone will do the same when Hiro's microbots form in his hand and wave to the audience.

Think about how difficult that action is. Some of the robots have to serve as a doll while others have to form the joints of individual fingers. Each one of them has to know their position to fulfill that function and then, above all, everyone. we have to move together with all the other micro robots to reach that specific position and then execute its function in conjunction with all the others and yet, as difficult as it may seem, by looking at the research, we once again learned that this It's not just science fiction stuff Hiro's microbots combine two fields of study: swarm robotics, where a group of smaller robots work together, and modular design, the idea of ​​taking a small number of modules that can then be combined together. and recombine in a variety of shapes and configurations.

An example of a self-configuring robot. See the puzzle's reconfigurable bipedal snake that is capable of moving as a two-legged bipedal walker like a human and at the same time has the ability to move on the ground like a snake or, if you're in the mood, to see a larger swarm of robots. Working together, look no further than Harvard once again, where his robotics teams also managed to create a swarm of a thousand robots capable of assembling into various shapes. It's nothing as complex as Hiro's swarm of microrobots. Yes, the total number of microbots is closer to millions, not thousands.

But we're on the right track, and the idea of ​​catching up with Hiro's microbots by the year 2150 seems easy considering how advanced these two fields are. So in terms of size and coordinated movement, Hiro's microbots not only seem realistically achievable, but even currently possible. However, there is a big part of Big Hero Six's label that seems to push the boundaries of the neural streamer's credibility. Microbots are controlled with this neurotransmitter. I think what I want them to do. They do it. This feels like part of the movie where things go from science fiction to the realm of fantasy.

At least that's what you might be thinking, but not only. its neural interface is a real field of study. It is a field of study that has shown some real results. Surprisingly, the idea of ​​creating machines capable of reading and reacting to human thought is quite old, dating back to the 1970s. One specific case that we know comes from a 1975 report titled Feasibility Study for the Design of a System biocybernetic communication. Which is based on the findings of a three-year study conducted by the Stanford Research Institute and funded by DARPA. I'm sure you've heard of it. at some point in a Marvel movie or on television.

Basically, it stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and it is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies used by the military and yes, if you are wondering, it is always military defense spending that It gives us these strange fringe sciences. that exceed the limits of the possible. This was especially true when there was an entire country willing to do whatever it took to outwit the Soviets in the Cold War; Anyway, the purpose of the study was to test the feasibility of designing a two-link human-computer communication using biological information from the muscles of the vocal apparatus and the electrical activity of the brain during overt and covert speech.

End of quote, to break it down into common English. The idea is that our brain has two ways of saying words: open speech out loud and covert speech, which is thinking to yourself, the idea is even when you're not opening your mouth to just say words? Thinking a sentence to yourself will activate the parts of your brain that process speech and language as if you had actually opened your mouth and Scobie those words out loud and these brain signals can then be read, translated and acted upon by a machine in short. . they could think thoughts on a computer instead of saying them out loud and they weren't wrong in their thinking about it.

The study found that electroencephalograph ii readings, EEG readings that measure electrical impulses in different parts of the brain for overt speech, actually matched those for covert speech now granted that the results were far from perfect. One source of error was that if the subjects were distracted or had one eye twitched, the brain signals telling the eyes to move would interfere with the speech signals, but according to the report once it took those errors into account to The match between what the machine read and what people were actually thinking ranged from 52% to 72%. Now those numbers may not seem that high, but think about what that says, it has what it is. essentially a mind-reading robot.

That's up to 72 percent accurate. This is pretty impressive and that was back in the 1970s. And in case you needed more evidence that Hiro's dream of neuro-BOTS that can react to your thoughts could one day be a reality, check out this headline from September 2018 Yes, the year we are currently in and a month ago claiming it is now. It is possible to communicate telepathically with a swarm of drones. There are many caveats here, the main one being that it is done through a chip that must be surgically implanted in the brain. This is not just a headband that you will place on your forehead. and take off at will, but if you're the kind of person who likes to undergo invasive brain surgery so you can show off your latest technological gadget;

Well, the future is now, friends. Although you might not want to jump on that boat too soon. We all seriously know what happened with Google Glass, although most of the people who have been test subjects for this technology are people who already are. undergo brain operations to help solve neurological problems such as epilepsy and the first results are surprisingly positive. How cool is it that even the most seemingly fantastic technology we see in Big Hero? 6 is really feasible not only in a hundred years, not only in 50 years, but right now, TODAY. We're already there when it comes to size.

Engineering swarms of robots that grow quickly and with the teamRight, you can even control drones with your mind right now, although

film

theory

is usually dedicated to ruining your childhood or, honestly, just your favorite. Movies since Big Hero 6 is only four years old at this point, that's not the case today. I'm here to make your favorite movies come true. Except for the fact that the

hero

es' device here is impressive to everyone, but it's simply copying technology that exists today a hundred years before the events of that movie. Oh, and the fact that microbots. managed to perform incredible feats of strength without risking depleting the tiny batteries they run on, in a

film

where it is established that simply walking around San Fransokyo for a day is enough to drain Baymax's battery down to practically zero Microbots, keep in mind account. control, no problem!

Effective batteries; Now, that's crazy. But hey, that's just a

theory

, a MOVIE theory and if you want to see more about how modular robotics technology is making transformers a reality, then neurologically move your mouse to the left and click on the box or alternatively if you want to see me ruin another one of your favorite Disney movies. That's the box on the right and make sure to subscribe because we've been hovering around 7 million subscribers for a long time. And it would be very nice to have 7 million subscribers on this channel before the end of the year.

Thank you. Guys, a lot to look at. See you for something a little scarier on a little more Halloween next week.