Really it was only a matter of time before I combined these two topics… 😂

It’s no secret that most companies are modernizing to keep up with our technology-centric society. However, one corporation seems to be really embracing these changes and are making clear strides towards a “great big beautiful tomorrow”. Between the amusement parks and rides, the Walt Disney Corporation is living on the cutting edge, as they are constantly utilizing the newest tech, and when necessary, inventing tools for the future.

Disney’s interest in staying modern isn’t a new trend. Looking back at the 1960’s, the Matterhorn Bobsled at Disney Land was the first “tubular-steel roller coaster ever built”. This set a new standard in amusement park attractions, and many parks, like Cedar Point, Six Flags, and Universal followed Disney’s pioneering footsteps.

 

However, Disney has impacted the world outside the amusement park industry as well. Anyone who has ever been on a Disney Parks vacation knows that everything is fun and games until you have to wait on a two-hour line to ride Splash Mountain. While the lines themselves are a different story, Disney developed the wait-time tracking technology. Each attraction posts a wait time that helps guests decide if they want to enter the queue or not. This technology has permeated into hospital waiting rooms, where knowing the wait time could be extremely useful to an injured guest. This is only one example of how Disney’s dedication to technology is impacting everyone in the world!

 

I’d like to preface this by stating that I haven’t been to Disney World in about 7 years, so I haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing this high-tech attraction. But, from the research I have done, as well as first hand accounts I’ve heard, the new Avatar Flight of Passage attraction is the new pinnacle of technology in amusement parks. Anyone who has ever seen the movie Avatar knows how immersive the setting is, and it’s clear to even the casual viewer that the film was a technological feat. With this being said, Disney knew that if they were going to translate the world of Pandora into a theme park attraction, they would have to create something nothing short of spectacular. First and foremost, Disney had to engineer a new way to combat long lines. They needed to find space to host all of the traffic but ensure that guests in line felt that the wait was worth their while. The Avatar Ride’s line is long enough to provide for a 6 hour wait time. Fortunately, the line only averages a two hour wait time everyday (even years after the ride’s debut). However, that’s still a lot of time standing around! Disney decided to make the line an interactive experience to keep guests engaged and interested. The line tells a story about the world of Avatar, and the history of the fictional world.

 

 

The concept of this ride was “Soarin’ over Pandora”. However, Disney took that idea and improved it tenfold. They consulted James Cameron, the creator of the Avatar movie, and worked with his vision to engineer a truly immersive experience for riders. The end product, Flight of Passage, is an augmented reality ride, in that it “brings elements of the virtual world into our real world”. This is done seamlessly, in a way that keeps guests what is real and what is virtual. The ride mimics the sensation of flying, as riders are seated atop the Ikran creatures that were heavily featured in the film. However, Imagineer Joe Rohde commented that, “In Flight of Passage, the sensation of flying is visceral, really believable. Not only do you have the more obvious aspects of flying – the swooping and curving – but we’ve put in crosswind, air density and banking”. Essentially, riders have a giant protection in front of them and the ride will move in varying directions based on the images in front of you. This doesn’t sound like anything new, but riders wear augmented reality goggles that make the world of Pandora come to life, so much so that many people have commented how they as though if they reached out and dismounted their creature, they would be able to walk straight into the scene.

 

The best and most innovative aspect of this ride is the technology that went into creating the Ikrans. Riders mount them as if they were on a motorbike, but the creatures look and feel nothing like a motorcycle. You can actually feel the “creature” breathing as you sit on it. You can see its sides expand and contract and can feel their pulse beating below you. Additionally, Disney pipes in smells in order to make the experience feel even more real. If you are “riding” near water, you can expect to feel a mist on your face, and if you are approaching a volcano, the smell of embers will be piped into the room. Critics and casual fans are raving about the technological feats of this attraction; however, Disney is being recognized with accolades and awards as well. In fact, the attraction was just given the industry award for most Outstanding Visual Effects.

These are only a few examples of how Disney is raising the standard when it comes to implementing technology into their parks. I think it’s safe to assume that when it comes to technology and innovation, the Walt Disney Corporation will, in the words of their founder, “keep moving forward”.

 

To sum up this message, I’ll leave you with this song, that is featured in my favorite underrated Disney World ride, The Carousel of Progress.

 

 

Sources:

https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2018/02/avatar-flight-of-passage-honored-with-industry-award-for-outstanding-visual-effects/

https://www.realitytechnologies.com/augmented-reality/

https://www.themeparktourist.com/features/20170906/33143/behind-ride-avatar-flight-passage?page=2

https://www.themeparktourist.com/features/20180706/34040/disney-s-biggest-technological-innovations-we-d-love-see-elsewhere?page=2

With the current polarized and hyper-political state of the world, most people are no stranger to the concept of fake news. This term refers to falsified stories that have been concocted and appear in the news media. In the past, fake news has been comprised mostly of hearsay and twisting the words and actions of others. However, new artificial intelligence technology has the capacity to take us to a brand new level, which could make it even more difficult to discern what is true and what is fabricated.

VoCo is a new technology developed by computer scientists at Princeton University that can best be described as “photoshop for the voice”. VoCo can alter the transcript of a recording to add or replace words in the audio. Similar to how skilled editors can take a photo of an Average Joe and turn him into a ripped Captain America lookalike, it is now possible to alter audio recordings and visuals to give the very realistic impression that someone has said something that they didn’t.

This technology wasn’t created with corrupt intentions however, and it was in fact meant to be a tool to edit audio tracks more easily for podcasts and narration. The creators even thought that it could have practical applications in robotics, to develop more lifelike, organic sounding machines. Additionally, Zeyu Jin, a former computer science student at Princeton, thought the technology could be used to create new movies with cartoon character icons, like Bugs Bunny, whose former voice actors have passed on. However, it has become clear that the technology raises a multitude of ethical questions and could prove to be extremely dangerous if placed in the wrong hands.

VoCo is extremely advanced, in that the algorithm it runs on will scour a voice recording until it finds snippets of audio said by a person and stitch them together to seamlessly form a new word, sentence, or phrase. It’s easy to see how this technology could be used to alter the words of public figures. In the below video of former President Barack Obama, he can be seen giving an extremely lifelike PSA. However, this entire video was created artificially using VoCo. If you search the Internet, you can find thousands of videos and audio interviews of Obama, so the creators of this falsified video had an abundance of material to work with and snippets to stitch together.

The malicious applications of this technology are extremely apparent, and wildly unethical. Political opponents could undermine their competitors by literally putting words in their mouths. Even more terrifying, imagine how VoCo could be used on a global scale! This technology has the very real capacity to ignite wars, break alliances, and create vicious and lasting tension between nations. This technology could even be used in trials to produce incriminating evidence against an innocent person or it could provide the semblance of doubt necessary to let a guilty individual walk free of charges. VoCo has the real potential to completely alter the way in which people consume visual and audio output and it has the capacity to drastically alter the way in which nations and people interact with each other.

Recently, Adobe has announced that they are in the primitive stages of development of their own program Adobe VoCo. This program would be available in most Adobe packages, which most computer users have, and it would have the ability to mimic speech by altering a textual transcript. Currently, this program is still in production and is not ready for mass public consumption, however, Adobe is making sure strides in the development. If this kind of technology was readily available for the casual user to use, there’s no telling what people would do with it. It seems to me that this could be opening the floodgates, and by allowing the masses access to such a powerful tool, there’s no telling the extend to which people could manipulate and incriminate each other.

I know that throughout this post I have been taking a very “glass half empty approach”. I know that there are probably more good people in the world than there are bad, and I promise I’m not as big of a pessimist as I appear to be. However, living in the media centric modern world that we do, we have already seen with how manipulative people can be to further their own agendas. It’s no secret that technology only facilitates the capacity to produce realistic fake news, and I think that we will have to take cautious steps forward to chart this unknown and scary territory.

 

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/04/599126774/can-you-believe-your-own-ears-with-new-fake-news-tech-not-necessarily

https://libraryguides.vu.edu.au/c.php?g=460840&p=5330655

https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2017/05/16/technology-edits-voices-text

 

What is 3D Printing?

It seems as though 3D printing is a topic that has quickly swept both the technology community as well as mainstream audiences in the past several years. In simple terms, 3D printing is the process of producing a three-dimensional solid creation from a digital file. The entire process of printing begins on your very own computer with creating a model using special software (such as CAD – Computer Aided Design). However, before you can make your creation into reality, you need to utilize a slicing software, which in turn will divide the model into thousands of small layers. After all that, it’s finally time to print your masterpiece, with a 3D printer, which can cost anywhere up to thousands of dollars or a few hundred depending on the size.

Overall, it’s not a cheap process. However, depending on what you are making and how you go about making it, 3D printing can be more cost effective than many current manufacturing methods used currently. And, with a little innovation, and skill, you can make some extraordinary things with this technology.

 

Current Uses:

Prosthetics

One of the most well known uses for 3D printing is to make prosthetics. For one thing, if done in an economic way, this can severely reduce the price that some people spend on their prosthetic limbs. Another great advantage is for children, who are constantly growing and needing new prosthetics. With some organizations charging thousands of dollars for prosthetics, 3D printing has been a saving grace for many. My mother, who is a nurse, has seen these benefits first hand. She works with disabled children, and 3D printing has made prosthetics more accessible for many of her students. Using this technology, you can create limbs that “grow with the child” meaning they expand and contract in different ways. If your kid hits a big growth spurt, it’s less expensive to print a new prosthetic than buy a new one. In addition, using this technology allows more customization of prosthetics, and it’s easy to make products that meet the individual needs of users.

 

A few summers ago, I attended a Biosciences and Engineering camp at Duke University. My time there concluded with a capstone project, in which my team and I designed and mapped out the logistics of a 3D printed prosthetic arm. We used CAD design software to create a model, and we even made it so the arm would expand as the child grew, to reduce the cost of having to buy a new arm every year for a growing kid. We mapped out the cost as well, and through research of the most cost effective methods, we were able to get the price down to only a few hundred dollars. Doing this project showed me firsthand that really anyone can learn how to 3D print. And it demonstrated how life changing this technology is to so many people.

 

Homes:

Before I began researching for this post, I didn’t even realize the possibilities of 3D printed houses. But it makes complete sense! Some companies have already ventured into this new territory, and the results are remarkable. ICON, a construction/tech company, and New Story, which is a housing charity organization, are working together to make this dream a reality. And their target demographic are families living in poverty and unsafe conditions. They built their first prototype in Austin Texas, and the duo’s ultimate goal is to get the cost of the houses down to $4,000 and for construction time to be les than one day. They already have plans to build an entire community of these houses in El Salvador in order to give the people there a safe place to live, with a nice, strong, door and walls to protect them from the elements. This idea is revolutionary, and I think that it could revolutionize the construction industry. If using 3D printing to make houses became more mainstream, we could really help reduce the homeless population. I also think that it could also help provide more immediate aid to people whose homes have been destroyed by natural disasters by giving them a roof to live under sooner.

 

Future Uses:

The future for 3D printing can honestly be boundless, and I truly think we can develop this technology as far as our imagination takes us. Already, the cost to 3D print is lessening, in comparison to a few years ago, it’s becoming extremely common for schools to have at least one of these printers. If it continues in this trend, it wouldn’t be an unreasonable to think that they could enter people’s homes within the coming years.

Already there are people working to 3D print: food, replicas of human organs, and custom ear buds. With this in mind, I think that it’s not unreasonable to expect humans to continue finding new problems for 3D printing to solve.

 

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