Star Trek Tech Comes to Life

In last week’s posting I reiterated my fondness for Star Trek (in case the picture of me between a Vulcan and a Starfleet officer wasn’t clue enough). Gene Roddenberry’s creation was prophetic in many ways. I know that Star Trek-like technology is in use today and has been covered ad nauseum but indulge my whimsy.

• The sliding door: In the 60s a door that opened as you approached it was not commonplace.
• The communicator: Flip open and talk. It’s a bit of a stretch but it certainly seems like a precursor to a flip phone.

Then there’s the tricorder: In Star Trek lore a tricorder is a handheld device used to gather and analyze information. There are two types of tricorder: the medical tricorder and the engineering tricorder.

When I was a kid, my friends and I made our own Star Trek props. One friend took six of his father’s LPs (long playing, 33 RPM records), painted them gold and used them as transporter pads. I was not nearly as inventive (plus, my father would not have been as understanding as my friend’s dad). My contribution was a block of wood tricorder, painted black with numbers and a screen drawn on it that fit in my hand.

We may not be close to a working transporter, but tricorders may be in our future.

According to Gizmag.com, Scanadu, a tech company based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, is developing a medical tricorder that will be able to measure vital statistics such as blood pressure, pulmonary function, and body temperature.

DVICE reports that Peter Jansen, a postdoc in a lab for "Engineering Non-Traditional Sensors" at the University of Arizona, has developed (from scratch) a perfectly functional Star Trek-style Tricorder. It's a portable sensor system and can measure ambient temperature, humidity, air pressure, magnetic fields, surface temperatures, colors, ambient light level, ambient polarization, acceleration, direction and distance (ultrasonically). It also has a GPS receiver. Jansen has made the plans available so anyone can build it.



Wow! Now this is cool! Do you think there’s a functioning biobed on the horizon?