Yesterday The company P had the great pleasure of be invited to Futur by Bon magazine, to listen at Capt. Cyborg himself, Prof. Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading.
You know you are doing something right, when you take a wrong turn on the way to a cybernetics speech with an open bar, and end up at the free drinks session at the 2008 Globe Forum. Eventually we navigated down to the glittering dungeon at Berns. It felt just days ago we sat there at SIME 2007, talking explosives with Dan Dubno. Anywho, enough with the namedropping, suffice to say it all felt very right for The P. Warwick was a great speaker, calm, clear and sort of childish, describing implant treatment of Parkinson’s disease, by deep brain stimulation, with warmth and respect. One very mind blowing segment was on robotics, and how they had grown brain cells from a rat and put them in control of the autonomous movement of a robot. It behaved partly as it supposed to, turning to the right as it’s sensors detected a nearby wall. Partly it did not. Warwick was energetic about this unpredictability and on the issues of teaching a bio enhanced machine (or tech augmented life if you will). To him the mere human is a subspecies, which he demonstrated persuasively in the Cyborg 1.0 and 2.0 experiments, when a sensor array was implanted directly to his nervous system. The fact that he had his wife implanted too, in what must have been a painful and most definitely potentially paralyzing operation, underlines this further (gender hierarchy issues aside).
And on this note The company P is proud to announce a newly started collaboration with Physical Interaction Lab. Together we will take sensors and actuators and augmented reality in pervasive entertainment to a new level.
