Wednesday, January 21, 2015
These Machines Will Teach You to Draw Whether You Like It Or Not
The Creators Project: In Brave New World, select children living in London in the year 2540 are educated via hypnopædia, a process by which information is piped into their ears while they sleep. Due to biological and technological limitations, the idea of mainlining your Judo skills remains little more than science fiction. For one Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design grad student, however, the real life science of neurofeedback sets the stage for a series of machines that could accelerate processes like drawing and playing an instrument by forcing parts of your body to go through the motions required to learn them.
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Wow, this is some serious future tech right here. If they could refine this, the applications could be endless for teaching users correct muscle memory for a near infinite amount of tasks. All the time when I'm learning something that requires any sort of physical motor skills, I second guess myself on whether I am doing the absolute optimal muscle movement. Even when you have a coach looking over your shoulder, they don't always catch all the bad habits you are developing in your form. To have a device that automatically and precisely forces your movements into the correct placement seems to be a pretty incredible leap forward in teaching and instruction. I certainly could see applications for this sort of haptic feedback and response teaching system in a million different industries and fields. Fine art and drawing is definitely just the tip of the iceberg! If the current iteration is something that a grad student 3d-printed over the course of a week, I am sure people could come up with a much better solution given adequate funding and time.
One of the initial reactions to these kind of machines and developments in technology is the “the machines are going to take over the world and humans will become irrelevant” argument. In this case the futuristic version of this technology is a macabre robotic skeleton wearing a long dead human body. I don’t think that will happen though. I liked the point that the inventor of the technology made; that the take away of this technology should not be that we should use it for everything, or use it for nothing, it is that there should be a middle ground, and that the technology, or any new development should contribute in some way, but not overwhelm what is already here. I also like that his philosophy about the machines is that they should augment human advancement, not replace it. Almost any technology has an application that it is perfectly suited for, and applications where it might be detrimental, knowing which is which is the key.
This is a very strange idea, and a very interesting one. I definitely agree that it would take some reconciling between “the robots we teach and the robots we learn from,” as the article says. There is a high potential for frustration, as we cannot control where the machine is going and which direction we are moving in. Additionally, I wonder as to how a “forced” mechanism can create muscle memory, especially as in the situation in the beginning when he describes learning the alphabet, he was controlling his movements and putting in effort of his own muscles to move the pencil across the page. In a situation where one has to be completely relaxed to allow the machine to control you, I’m somewhat doubtful as to whether or not actual muscle memory could be achieved. I also wonder if it would not be easier on the participants in the machine followed a simpler path, like drawing a rectangle or a more complex but still recognizable and less random shape. That way, with repetitions, one may actually learn how to improve upon their drawing. But overall, a very interesting project across many fields. I look forward to seeing what happens with it.
The motto I associate with someone’s ability to draw comes from the Disney movie Ratatouille; that anyone can learn to draw in the same way anyone can learn to cook. There are people out there who can very naturally draw well but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the people who don’t possess this raw talent are necessarily bad they just need to work at it a little more. With the fact that their is a machine that is in development to help people gain muscle memory is fantastic. So often the hardest hurdle to get over when learning something is the muscle memory because people often lose motivation in the face of discomfort or results not shown fast enough. And sometimes everyone needs that gentle but firm push in the right direction to get the ball rolling. From the article and video it seems this machines might just be that push.
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