Back in 2014, Big Hero 6 fast forwarded us to the year of 2150,
to see a world where science is practically magic.
Between Honey Lemon's chem lab in a purse able to summon every element on the periodic table,
Tomago's electromagnetic rollerblades and Baymax's cutting-edge diagnostic technology,
any way you slice it, Disney's vision of the future is filled with technological fantasies beyond our wildest imagination!
Which makes it all the more mind-blowing to me that 136 years later, amidst it all,
we're still using iPhones.
"Everybody say Hiro!"
"Hiro!!
"
Hello Internet! Welcome to Film Theory!!
Just as squishy as Baymax.
(not nearly as useful however...)
So the other day I was binge-buying a bunch of Disney movies on Google Play
since Disney is launching their own Netflix-style subscription service next year,
and I expect them to make all of their movies impossible to buy in order to force everyone to subscribe to this thing,
and I just can't handle another subscription service in my life!
Why can't I just own the things I'm paying for?!
Whoo! Millennial angst talking.
And already, movies like Cinderella, Little Mermaid and Aladdin aren't available, which is just sad.
I just wanna own a movie... :'( T ʖ̯ T
Anyway, as I was saying, this binge session got me to revisit a bunch of Disney movies
that I kind of overlooked or skimmed over the first time that I watched them
and one such movie was Big Hero 6!
And you know what stood out?
Not just the impressive futuristic technology, but the sheer volume and variety of it in this movie!
An inflatable medical robot,
plasma weaponry, a deadly sign-spinning exosuit.
But by far the most incredible thing, or things, that we see in the movie are these: the Microbots.
Our main character Hiro, (that's Hiro with an H-I-R-O, not to be confused with Big Hero 6 H-E-R-O of the movie's title)
invents these deceptively simple robots that, when their powers combine, can practically do it all.
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 science fair.
Anything that goes beyond "I dropped teeth and soda and made 'em dissolve" is gonna be impressive, let alone "I invented a technology that will
revolutionize
robotics." These micro-bots catch the eye of our villain, who looks like he was ripped straight out of Fortnite season 5, and he ends up
stealing the technology to achieve number one victory royale. Anyway, all of it
got me wondering: Could a
technology like this
Actually work? Will I,
sometime in the next hundred and thirty six years, be able to control a swarm of micro-bots using only my mind to, I don't know,
do whatever micro robots controlled by your mind do.
Make a smoothie! Film theorists, start warming up those
tri-fold boards now, because today we're looking at Hiro's winning science fair project and teaching you how to steal what he did to get yourself
an A-plus. Oh yeah, I changed the history of modern robotics.
Why is it always a tri-fold board? Aren't those things used for
anything else? The way Hiro introduces these things in the movie make him seem like he's a
reincarnated Steve Jobs, showing us the iPhone 70, now with even fewer features and faster planned obsolescence.
But looking past Hiro's height, what exactly would it take to invent the microbots that we see in the movie?
I think you could break it down into three clear components. One:
The microbots are small and are all capable of moving
independently. Two: the microbots are capable of moving in a coordinated manner with hundreds, or even
thousands, of them acting together in response to a single command. And last of all - this one's the doozy - number three:
The microbots are controlled by the user's mind via a neural interface. Think it and it happens.
"The microbots are controlled with this neurotransmitter.
I think what I want them to do
They do it." And we have to do all of that within the next hundred and thirty six years. Think it can be done? Place
your bets now in the comments, and then re-watch this video in 2150 and tell me if you are right.
I'll just be hanging out in my stasis pod waiting to be revitalized by then
So, you know, I'll be looking for a bit of excitement first the size the microbots are as you might guess from the name
Individually, very small looking less than an inch long and as it turns out this is entirely possible not just in the future but today
right now
2018 as you are watching this video, in fact real-world robotics actually get a lot smaller than what Hiro showing as far back as
2005
scientists were creating robots that were literally named micro robots because they were only 60
micrometers wide and 200 50 micrometers long
so tiny that you'd need a
Microscope to actually see them moving a hero if your robots aren't small enough for their lengths to be measured in micrometers
Maybe you should consider giving them a different name like Milla BOTS or senti bots
It's not quite as catchy
But it is certainly more accurate truth in advertising my friend now
Granted these real-world micro robots are a far cry from the micro robots that we see in the movie these 60
Micrometer robots can move along like an inchworm, but they're not useful for all that much
So a better question would be could you actually make a useful?
Robot as small as the microbots in big hero 6 the answer is yet again a surprising
Yes in 2015 scientists at Harvard unveiled the Robo be a drone whose body is shorter than the diameter of a penny
unlike the micro robots
which seemed like more of an experiment to simply see how small they could make the tech the Robo bees are actually small for a
Specific reason a small size lets them fly more easily and they're so light that they can cling to surfaces like an actual bee wood
Using static electricity it also has the really nifty function of carrying a tiny camera
Which means that it has real-world applications is the world's smallest spy drone
Think about that the next time you feel an insect landing on your neck
Maybe it's not some angry Hornet coming to plant a stinger in your flesh
maybe it's just some foreign government who wants to really close-up photos of the inside of your ear suffice it to say
size-wise Hiro's microbots
Go solidly in the territory of not only possible in the year 2115
But actually already done in the Year 2015
Okay
So it's one thing to make a robot small, but it's entirely
another thing to have an entire
swarm of robots that are all able to move together and this isn't just as simple as have a bunch of micro robots and tell
Them all to do the same thing when Hiro's microbots
Form into the hand and wave at the audience. Think about how hard that action is
some of the bots have to serve as the wrist while others have to form the joints of the
individual fingers each one of those has to know its position to serve that function and then on top of it all they all have
to move in conjunction with all the other micro robots to get into that specific position and then
Execute its function in tandem with everyone else and yet for as difficult as it may be looking at the research
We once again learned that this isn't simply the stuff of science fiction
Hiro's microbots
combine two fields of study swarm robotics where a bunch of separate smaller robots work together and
Modular design the idea of taking a small number of modules that can then be combined and recombined in a variety of shapes and configurations
For an example of a self-configuring robot. See the rebus
reconfigurable bipedal snake
which is capable of moving as a
two-legged biped walker like a human while also having the ability to move around on the ground like a snake or if you're in the
Mood for a larger swarm of robots all working together
well
look no further than Harvard yet again where their robotics teams have also managed to create a
Thousand robot swarm capable of assembling itself into various shapes sure. It's nothing nearly as complex as Hiro's microbots swarm. Yes
We're the total number of microbots is closer to millions not thousands
But we're on the right track and the idea of catching up to Hiro's microbots by the year
twenty one fifty seems easy when you consider how far along these two fields are so in terms of size and
Coordinated movement Hiro's microbots look not only realistically attainable, but even currently possible
However, there's one huge part of big hero six is tag
That seems to stretch the limits of believability the neural transmitter. The 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 move out of science-fiction and into the realm of fantasy
At least that's what you might be thinking but not only her neural interface is a real field of study
It's a field of study that has shown some real
Results surprisingly enough the idea of creating machines capable of reading and reacting to human thought is pretty old dating all the way back
to the 1970s one specific case that we know about comes from a
1975 report titled feasibility study for design of a bio cybernetic communication system
Which is based on the findings of a three year study conducted by the Stanford Research Institute and funded by DARPA
Which I'm sure you've heard of at some point in a Marvel movie or on TV. Basically, it stands for Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency and is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for development of emerging technologies that military uses and yes
If you're wondering it is always military defense spending that gives us these weird fringe Sciences that push the limits of what's possible
This was especially true when you had an entire country willing to do whatever it took to outwit the Soviets in the Cold War
anyway
the purpose of the study was quote to test the feasibility of designing a close coupled two-way communication link between man and
Computer using biological information from muscles of the vocal apparatus and the electrical activity of the brain during overt and covert
Speech end quote, so to break that down into ordinary English. The thinking is that our brain has two ways of delivering words overt
Speech speaking out loud and covert speech which is thinking to yourself the idea
Is that even when you're not opening your mouth to say words simply?
thinking a sentence to yourself will activate the parts of your brain that
processed speech and language
just as if you had actually opened your mouth and Scobie those words aloud and these brain signals can then be read and
Translated and acted upon by a machine in short you could think thoughts to a computer instead of saying them out loud
and they weren't wrong in their thinking around this the study found that the
electroencephalograph ii readouts
EEG readouts which measure electrical impulses in different parts of the brain for overt speech actually matched up with the ones for covert speech now
granted the results were far from perfect one source of error was that if subjects were distracted or had a twitchy eye the
Signals from the brain telling the eyes to move would interfere with the signals for the speech but according to the report
once you accounted for those errors to match between what the Machine read out and what people were actually thinking ranged from 52% to
72% Now those numbers might not sound all that high, but think about what that's saying you've got what is essentially a mind-reading robot
That's as much as 72 percent accurate. That is pretty darn impressive
and that was way back in the
1970s. And in case you needed any more evidence that Hiro's dream of neuro-BOTS that can react to your thoughts might one day be
A reality see this headline from September of 2018
Yeah
The year that we are currently in and a month ago stating that it's now possible to telepathically communicate
With a drone swarm
There are a lot of caveats here the main one being that it's done via a chip that has to be surgically
implanted into the brain
this isn't just some headband that you're gonna slap on your
Forehead and take off at will but if you're the kind of person who's into getting invasive brain surgery
So you can show off your latest tech gadget; well, the future is now friends
Although you might not want to hop on that boat too soon
We all know what happened to Google glass in all seriousness, though
Most of the people who've been test subjects for this technology are people who are already having brain operations to help solve
Neurological issues like epilepsy and early results are shockingly positive
How cool is it that even the most fantastical seeming technology that we see in big hero?
6 is actually feasible not just in a hundred years not just in 50 years
but right now, TODAY. We're already there when it comes to size
Engineering swarm robots as quickly scaling up and with the right equipment you can even control drones with your mind right now
even though film theory is usually in the business of 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 am here to make your favorite movies come true
well
Except for the fact that heroes device here is impressive to everyone but he's simply just ripping off technology that exists today
a hundred years prior to the events of that movie
Oh and the fact that the microbots managed to perform amazing feats of strength without ever being at risk of draining the teeny tiny
Batteries that they run on, in a film where it's established
that simply waddling around San fransokyo for a day is enough to drain Baymax's battery to practically zero
Microbots, mind control, No problem! Effective batteries; now, that is crazy talk
But hey
that's just a theory
a FILM theory
and
If you want to see more about how modular robotics technology is making
transformers into a reality
well
then
neurologically move your mouse over to the left and click the box or
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