{"id":14793,"date":"2014-05-10T19:41:53","date_gmt":"2014-05-11T00:41:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=14793"},"modified":"2014-05-10T19:41:53","modified_gmt":"2014-05-11T00:41:53","slug":"hikaru-meets-hiroshi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=14793","title":{"rendered":"Hikaru meets Hiroshi"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, where I&#8217;ve been visiting at the MIT Media Lab, we got a visit from George Takei, who has been going around the world with a TV crew to showcase cool research.  My brilliant colleague Hiroshi Ishii showed him their group&#8217;s spatially transforming <a href=http:\/\/vimeo.com\/79179138 target=1>inFORM dynamic shape display<\/a>, and George had a great conversation about the research with Hiroshi and his Ph.D. students.<\/p>\n<p>As I watched this, I couldn&#8217;t help thinking about Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu, the senior helmsman on the U.S.S. Enterprise, an iconic role famously played by Takei.  When <i>Star Trek<\/i> originally aired, a Japanese character who was a respected scientist and a man of peace was unheard of on American television &#8212; it was truly a groundbreaking role, which defiantly smashed prejudices.<\/p>\n<p>And now here he was &#8212; the man who had portrayed a brilliant Japanese scientist hero for a generation of Americans &#8212; encountering the exciting research of an actual brilliant Japanese scientist hero in today&#8217;s America.  Something about this made me very happy.<\/p>\n<p>I had a nice conversation with George afterward.  He really liked the way Hiroshi&#8217;s work goes far beyond mere pixels on a screen, to interfaces that literally transform in shape.<\/p>\n<p>As we stood next to one of Hiroshi&#8217;s spatially transforming interfaces, I told George &#8220;I probably shouldn&#8217;t say this, but seeing you interact with this futuristic 3D device, I just keep thinking &#8216;Space &#8212; the final frontier.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>George laughed and said, &#8220;I can hear the theme music.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, where I&#8217;ve been visiting at the MIT Media Lab, we got a visit from George Takei, who has been going around the world with a TV crew to showcase cool research. My brilliant colleague Hiroshi Ishii showed him their group&#8217;s spatially transforming inFORM dynamic shape display, and George had a great conversation about the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=14793\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Hikaru meets Hiroshi&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14793"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14793"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14794,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14793\/revisions\/14794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}