Steerable Humans?

By Alan

Remember the key plot to the Disney movie Ratatouille? The adorable, [and hygienic] rat turned an un-culinary young man into a virtual cooking platform, by mysterious means of grabbing his hair, and manipulating food, spices, cooking utensils, and even knives.

While this got a good chuckle out of the audiences everywhere, and most people thought, "how absurd!" there is actually some good scientific studies behind the idea of subtle adjustments to pressure on the head that will strangely compel people to follow those pressures to go follow directions. Mothers certainly know that grabbing the ear of a child will often get instant cooperation on following, even if considerable whining might accompany it.

No one is absolutely sure about how this works, but already someone at SIGGRAPH has started to exploit the idea using existing technology.

At the SIGGRAPH conference, the Emerging Technologies exhibit often has interesting new products that are coming soon to market, or perhaps might come to market, or really weird stuff that is never coming to market, but is just plain cool and probably not very useful.

Enter Navi-Pull. Developed by a team of researchers at The University of Electro-Communications in Japan, this device employs 2 hooks that are fastened to your ears, and pull on them in up to 6 different directions. Wearers of the device feel a strange compulsion to follow the directions of the system.

While no one is going to give this device any fashion credits, it does lead to some interesting questions:

• What happens if someone uses the device for so long, that they would follow it, even if they knew it was wrong (This isn't outrageous, because people have been known to drive off the road while following GPS directions that were poor).
• Can this be shrunk down to fit behind the ear?
• Is it going to be compatible with my bluetooth cell phone?
• Are the robot overlords going to let me finish typing this note?

Read more about it in the SIGGRAPH 36 presentation notes.