Category: BCM325

[Video] Doraemon Anywhere Door – Future Reality or Manga Legend?

My research project of BCM325: Future Cultures focuses on Doraemon, a Japanese manga, and its wonderful technology predictions. I decided to base my work around one technology that I think is the best technology presented in the manga, Anywhere Door – a door that takes you anywhere you want by simply walking through it. In this short piece of writing, I will explain the reason why I chose Anywhere Door as the research focus and reflect on my aims and findings.

First of all, I want to talk about why I chose Anywhere Door for my research project. In total, there were 1344 chapters of Doraemon released in the original series, featuring hundreds of gadgets. Although all of those gadgets are interesting technologies of the future, I cannot do research about all of them due to the massive amount of work required. Therefore, my approach was focusing on one prominent gadget while briefly presenting several other gadgets as background information, which I think is a more suitable approach for the scope of my research. Another reason rooted in my personal circumstance. As an international student in Australia, I have to stay away from my beloved family. Although I want to see them every day, I have to wait for at least three and a half months to come back home by the end of the semester with at least nine hours travelling by airplanes. Therefore, I want to discover whether Anywhere Door or Teleportation can be reality in near future, which can make travelling, especially over huge distance, way easier.

Secondly, the research aims and findings are reflected. The aims of my research are divided into two small points: human transportation development progress and teleportation scientific theories. Although I have noticed that human beings have achieved many breakthroughs in transportation recently, I have never actually paid attention to how significant they are compared to other means of transport in previous decades. Therefore, I want to investigate this progress in order to see if the future of transportation is bright and optimistic, and if there is still room for further improvements. I decided to look at commercial transportation only because Anywhere Door is meant to be a more accessible to the public. After doing some research, I have figured out that it took around 150 years for human travelling speed to increase by 30 times, from the first railway to commercial airplanes nowadays, which I think is incredible and signals a very promising future.

Finally, another goal of my research is to discover some possible scientific theories that can turn Anywhere Door or Teleportation into reality. There were several possibilities came up during my research, among which ‘Quantum Entanglement’ was the most notable. Simply speaking, teleportation using quantum entanglement can function by scanning and sending the state of the transported object from the departure point to the arrival point where it can be recreated identically using the transmitted data. However, this sounds more like scanning and printing rather than transporting, because the original object remains in the first place and will be destroyed afterwards once being recreated successfully to guarantee that there is only one version of it in the universe. Another possibility is travelling through wormholes, or in other words, the connection between two black holes. This idea was proposed by Stephen Hawking with his theory Hawking Radiation about how the two black holes can be entangled, which creates a connection or a wormhole in between which people can travel through. However, there are lots of barriers to this theory because no one has approached a black hole to know exactly what is inside, or there are other arguments that nothing can escape a black hole. Therefore, at this stage, ‘Quantum Entanglement’ is still more feasible than wormholes because tiny objects like photons have been successfully transmitted over huge distance such as from the earth to the orbit by a group of Chinese scientists. However, there is still a big gap from transferring a photon to teleporting a person.

In conclusion, this short piece of writing has informed about my choice of Anywhere Door as my case study, as well as my research aims and findings. It is obvious that transportation in particular and technology in general, have attained significant achievements over time, and will continue to progress in the future. On the other hand, the barriers in teleportation possibilities signify that it will take much more time and effort for Anywhere Door to be brought into reality. However, I still believe that we have the right to hope, because according to the book Sails in the sky (1938), people of the 15th century used to claim Leonardo da Vinci’s idea of airplane to be crazy, and now we are absolutely not crazy, but are actually sailing, in the sky, with airplanes.

References:

Agarwal, A 2017, ‘Anywhere Door: Doeramon’s Gadget into a reaity’, Research Paper, Aligarh Muslim University.

Benson, A 2015, ‘The utopia of suburbia: the unchanging past and limitless future in Doraemon’, Japan Forum, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 235-256

Brodwin, E 2016, An Italian surgeon has renewed his promise to perform the world’s first head transplant after a ‘proof-of-concept’ experiment on a dog, Business Insider, viewed April 29th 2017, <http://www.businessinsider.com/italian-surgeon-head-transplant-dog-experiment-2016-9&gt&gt;

Captain Cartoon 2015, Doraemon Intro (American Version), online video, December 28th, Captain Cartoon, viewed May 30th 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxQK1WDYI_k&t=216s&gt;.

Coke 2013, Star Trek: The Motion Picture – Transporter Accident, online video, April 6th, Coke, viewed May 30th 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxQK1WDYI_k&t=216s&gt;.

Hardy, MA, Furr, A, Barret, JP, & Barker, JH 2017, ‘Review: The immunologic considerations in human head transplantation’, International Journal of Surgery, vol. 41, pp. 196-202

Human Progress 2015, Quantum Entanglement Simplified Microscopic Universe, online video, December 23rd, Human Progress, viewed May 30th 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxQK1WDYI_k&t=216s&gt;.

Minutephysics 2017, How to Teleport Schrödinger’s Cat, online video, March 15th, minutephysics, viewed May 30th 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxQK1WDYI_k&t=216s&gt;.

Minutephysics 2016, Transporters and Quantum Teleportation, online video, March 15th, minutephysics, viewed May 30th 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxQK1WDYI_k&t=216s&gt;.

‘Sails in the Sky’, 1938, Time, vol. 31, no. 18, p. 69.

Seeker 2018, Will We Ever Be Able to Travel Through a Wormhole?, online video, February 3rd, Seeker, viewed May 30th 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxQK1WDYI_k&t=216s&gt;.

Seeker 2013, Will Teleportation Ever Be Possible?, online video, February 8th, Seeker, viewed May 30th 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxQK1WDYI_k&t=216s&gt;.

The Atlantic 2015, An Animated History of Transportation, online video, July 8th, The Atlantic, viewed May 30th 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxQK1WDYI_k&t=216s&gt;.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BCM325 LiveTweets Reflection

Hi all!

Hope you are having a good time. My name is Cuong Lam, and welcome to my blog. For anyone that does not know, I am a third year student studying Communication and Media at University of Wollongong, Australia. For this semester, I am studying a subject called Future Cultures, and for each week we are shown movies in class (yes you got it right, movies in class!) and during the screening we have to live tweet any relevant content or comment about the movie on Twitter. Therefore, in this blog post I will make a reflection on all of the six live tweeting sessions (I missed the first one :P). And here we go:

Week 2: WestWorld (1973).

Westworld is a 1973 American science fiction Western thriller film written and directed by novelist Michael Crichton about amusement park androids that malfunction and begin killing visitors (Wikipedia).

Liked Tweets:

Reflection:

It was interesting to see how not only me, but also my classmates reacted to the rebellion of robots in Westworld. In particular, we tend to focus not on the fact that robots were killing human in the movie, but instead the cause of the rebellion, which was the way human treated robots. It seems like the human characters were able to express their darkest side by being put into a world full of what they thought to be insentient and will accept whatever they do. The tweet that I consider best reflects this was Noelle’s: “pays 1K a day and literally ends up in jail lol”. So true. These people paid $1000 not to enjoy the theme park, but to commit crimes that they cannot do in real life, and the chaos was what they deserved.

Week 3: Johnny Mnemonic (1995).

Johnny Mnemonic is a 1995 Canadian-American cyberpunk action thriller film directed by Robert Longo in his directorial debut. The film stars Keanu Reeves and Dolph Lundgren. The film is based on the story of the same name by William Gibson. Keanu Reeves plays the title character, a man with a cybernetic brain implant designed to store information. The film portrays Gibson’s dystopian view of the future with the world dominated by megacorporations and with strong East Asian influences (Wikipedia).

Liked Tweets:

Reflection:

The common theme dominated across the screening of Johnny Mnemonic was how funny the future was depicted in the movie as everything looked old-fashioned and simply not modern enough to be ‘the future’. However, one thing that was recognised by many of us was how the future in the movie was dark, pessimistic and somehow a dystopia. This can be reflected by my most-likable tweet of this session: “Take a look around, this is actually the future of E-Waste”, and another wonderful tweet from Noelle (again): “Why do they depict the future to have rubbish everywhere idgi”. The future with all the advanced technologies suppose to be fancy, but in the movie, it was only covered in darkness, isn’t it weird? Maybe the answer lies in how the protagonist, Johnny, after all the happenings just wants to be a normal human again, and it seems like most of my peers felt this way too. This tweet from Aiman says it all: “At the end of the day, everyone wants to be “human” again”.

Week 4: The Matrix (1999).

Liked Tweets:

Reflection:

Again, another Keanu Reeves movie featuring the future seems dark and pessimistic. “The buildings and city don’t look futuristic at all – just dystopian and deteriorating” – Claire’s tweet. I feel like a lot of media products, not only movies, tend to depict a future of technologies that does not turn out to be the best, but actually describe a fear of being controlled by technologies instead. Another common theme of the screening was how the green filter used in the movie was widely recognised, which reflected the boundary between virtual world and reality. Besides, the best thing I experienced from this week’s live tweeting was a conversation with several classmates about how simulation technology would be used in the future for tourism purpose. We had discussed several possible technologies, from VR to memory bank and also memory purchase, which I considered very interesting as innovation and prediction seems to be limitless.

Week 5: Black Mirror Season 2 Episode 1

“Be Right Back” is the first episode of the second series of British science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. It was written by series creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker, directed by Owen Harris and first aired on Channel 4 on 11 February 2013.

The episode tells the story of Martha (Hayley Atwell), a young woman whose boyfriend Ash Starmer (Domhnall Gleeson) is killed in a car accident. As she mourns him, she discovers that technology now allows her to communicate with an artificial intelligence imitating Ash, and reluctantly decides to try. “Be Right Back” had two sources of inspiration: the question of whether to delete a dead friend’s phone number from one’s contacts, and the idea that Twitter posts could be made by software mimicking dead people.

“Be Right Back” explores the theme of grief; it is a melancholy story similar to the previous episode, “The Entire History of You“. Its presentation of Martha and Ash’s relationship is brief but depicts a loving relationship, many aspects of which are inverted with Martha and the AI that imitates Ash, which is unable to replicate the small details of Ash’s behaviour. (Wikipedia)

Liked Tweets:

Reflection:

Throughout the screening session, I had noticed that how my peers, as well as myself, were uncomfortable thinking of the storyline. What happened in the movie could be a possible outcome of human’s dependence on technology, according to Ashleigh’s tweet: “Humans are always getting attached to our devices, giving names and personalities to them. But this is on a whole different level”. Moreover, it also raised concerns around mental issues, which might happen not only to the protagonist, but anyone of us as a result of excessive attachment to technology: “is anyone else concerned for this woman’s mental health?” – Cassie’s tweet. However, although this technology will face controversies if one day it is brought to life, I cannot tell for sure what I would react to it once I was put in the same situation: “Fooling myself into the illusion that someone you love is still alive, or facing the truth? I don’t have an idea to be honest”. A great episode, a great idea leaving us with a lot of questions inside I believe.

Week 6: Robot and Frank

Robot & Frank is a 2012 American science fiction comedy-drama film directed by Jake Schreier and written by Christopher Ford. Set in the near future, it focuses on Frank Weld, an aging jewel thief played by Frank Langella, whose son buys him a domestic robot. Resistant at first, Frank warms up to the robot when he realizes he can use it to restart his career as a cat burglar. It was the first feature film for both Ford and Schreier and received critical acclaim for its writing, production, and acting. It won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, tying with the Kashmiri film Valley of Saints. (Wikipedia)

Liked Tweets:

Reflection:

Unlike Johnny Mnemonic or The Matrix, the future in Robot and Frank seems to be more realistic, maybe because it was made at a recent date. However, without the e-waste or green filter, it still reflects a dystopian view: “The dystopian future in #RobotandFrank is not a robot that cares, but a library without books” – Chris’s tweet. The movie led us to different emotional stages, but I wonder that which stage or scenario was the saddest: the fact that people had to use robots to take care of their parents, aged people get attached to robots more than with their kids, or human could teach robots to commit crime? It was a dystopian view indeed, according to Frank Langella himself: “It doesn’t turn into a sentimental buddy movie at all”. Above all, it was obvious that both I and my peers were touched by the storyline of this movie, by the relationship between Frank and the robot, and by the fact that robots can actually feel, express emotion and empathy: “noooo just go to jail as friends don’t wipe memory” – Ashleigh’s tweet.

Week 7: Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 6

“Hated in the Nation” is the sixth and final episode of the third season of British science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. Written by series creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker and directed by James Hawes, it premiered on Netflix on 21 October 2016, along with the rest of series three.[1] It is the longest episode in the series at 89 minutes.

The episode is a murder mystery, and follows Detective Karin Parke (Kelly Macdonald) and her new partner Blue Coulson (Faye Marsay) who, together with the help of National Crime Agency officer Shaun Li (Benedict Wong), try to solve the inexplicable deaths of people who were all the target of social media. (Wikipedia)

 

Liked Tweets:

Reflection:

It was obvious from this final screening session of another episode from Black Mirror that we all realised how dystopian the theme was. Everyone was freaked out by the fact that tiny bees could be used as killing weapons and could be controlled by a daily social networking tool which was Twitter. Moreover, I was grateful to know that someone did share the same opinion with me that bees and hashtags are just a metaphor for cyberbullying: “I mean it’s not nice for people to wish someone dies on the internet, but they know it wouldn’t actually happen, so how do they actually feel now that someone is making these hated pupils a target of society ?” – Angus’s tweet; “Losing control of the bees a metaphor about how we can never control the internet?” – Edwina’s tweet; “This movie is a metaphor of the effect of online bullying. Victims might not die, but they are dead inside” – my own tweet. I totally agree with them that Internet in particular or technology in general will develop in any way depending on how we use them, just like the bees which can be used for ordinary purposes but can also be used as deadly weapons.

 

BCM325 Research Overview – Doraemon’s Anywhere Door.

Hi everyone!

Hope you are having a good time. It’s great to come back to my blog with another new post. For anyone that does not know, I am doing a research project about Doreamon’s famous idea of Anywhere Door, a magical door that takes you any where you want by walking through it. I have written a blog where I proposed my initial thoughts, which can be found here:

In this podcast, I will provide my research findings to partly help me in answering the question of whether Anywhere Door will come into reality, or remain an imaginary means of transport.

Let me know what you think down below in the comment section.

Hope you enjoy it!

Cuong.

 

Reference:

Aditi, S 2017, ‘Quantum entanglement and its applications’, Current Science (00113891), vol. 112, no. 7, pp. 1361-1368.

Agarwal, A 2017, ‘Anywhere Door: Doraemon’s Gadget into a reality’, Research Paper, Aligarh Muslim University.

Chin, M 2015, New method of quantum entanglement vastly increases how much information can be carried in a photon, Phys.org, viewed April 22nd 2018, <https://phys.org/news/2015-06-method-quantum-entanglement-vastly-photon.html&gt;.

Weiss, D, ‘Star Trek and the Posthuman’, viewed April 22nd 2018, <http://faculty.ycp.edu/~dweiss/research/Star%20Trek%20and%20the%20Posthuman.pdf&gt;.

The Atlantic (2015), An Animated History of Transportation, [Online Video], viewed April 22nd 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaLCQo8NJFA&gt;.

‘Sails in the Sky’, 1938, Time, vol. 31, no. 18, p. 69.

BCM325 Research Introduction: Doraemon’s Future Predictions – Are we getting close? – ‘Anywhere door’.

In this short blog, I will make a brief introduction of my research project for BCM325: Future Cultures. In particular, I will indicate my research topic, research plan and digital artifact presentation.

Research topic:

Personally, I am passionate about Japanese manga and the famous ‘Doraemon’ is undoubtedly among my favorites. The content is about a robot from the future, Doraemon, who travels back in time to provide help to a boy who struggles in life, through the use of his ‘gadgets’, which are tools of the future (22nd century in particular). As a little boy, I only dreamed of making life easier with those gadgets, but have never thought of actually having any of them in real life. However, as time flew, I grew up and technology developed, I started to realise many of those gadgets have been turned into existence. Not a few of them, many of them. Watch this:

 

As you can see, the cutting-edge technology of the 22nd century that was depicted in Doraemon is on its way into existence in the early 21st century that we are living today. Therefore, I am optimistic that what Fujiko Fujo – the author – predicted in the manga was not just about a Utopian world (an imagined place where everything is perfect, symbolizing people’s hopes and dreams), but actually a future world that is not impossible to reach (Benson 2015). But the question is, are we getting close? Therefore, I decided to commit my research project to partly answer this question by focusing on one gadget that I believe is the best idea in the manga – the ‘Anywhere door’, a door that takes you anywhere you want by simply… walking through it.

Research plan:

I plan to focus my research into two sub-topics. First of all, because ‘Anywhere door’ is actually a means of transport, I will look at the transport revolution to figure out how developed transportation has been since the earliest days of human history. Although travelling to a destination that is thousands miles apart in seconds is a crazy idea, we still have the right to hope based on the incredible improvements in transportation throughout the years. The following infographics indicate the various achievements in transportation that humans have accomplished:

speed-lon
Credit: treehugger.com
transportation-history--the-evolution-of-travel_518a96a62f7db_w1500
Credit: visual.ly

Looking at the above infographics, we can see that transportation has been through a long revolution process from the earliest days. People of the 15th century claimed Leonardo da Vinci’s idea of aeroplane to be crazy (Sails in the Sky, 1938), and now we are travelling intercontinently in less than a day in aeroplanes and claiming Fujiko Fujio’s (Doraemon’s author) idea of ‘Anywhere door’ to be crazy again, isn’t it ironic? We have reasons to hope, and I will put effort into research to find out whether those reasons are rational enough.

Secondly, I want to discover whether there is any scientific foundation to turn this idea into reality. There might be achievements that signal positive progress, but if there is no scientific and realistic base, that progress will have a limit. For example, in Doraemon, Fujiko Fujio once featured a machine that allows two people to switch their heads together to experience the other’s body. This idea has been initiated in real life with the case of  Sergio Canavero, an Italian doctor who is researching to perform the world’s first head transplantation (Brodwin 2016). Although there have been incredible improvements and discoveries in the medical industries, this idea still remains impossible according to several scientific foundations such as the head cannot stay alive on its own, the immune system cannot accept another body or the surgery has to happen in under an hour (Hardy et al 2017).

Therefore, through my research, I want to figure out whether ‘Anywhere door’ is actually science, or just science fiction. Theories about time and space such as Einstein’s ‘General Relativity’, which explains that space can be warped (Agarwal 2017), will be put into consideration .

Digital Artifact Presentation:

I plan to present my findings in the form of a video which I believe to be more interactive as it provides more visuals. Along with the visuals, there will be a voice-over to serve the purpose of explanation and clarification. The structure of the artifact will be mostly based on the outline of this blog post as I will introduce Doraemon as a background for my research topic along the evidence to prove that Fujiko Fujio was a genius for the future predictions. Secondly, my interest in the idea of ‘Anywhere door’ will be expressed and supported by the achievements in transportation history. Finally, I will make a conclusion based on my scientific findings of whether this idea lies in the future, or remains a manga legend.

References:

Agarwal, A 2017, ‘Anywhere Door: Doeramon’s Gadget into a reaity’, Research Paper, Aligarh Muslim University.

Benson, A 2015, ‘The utopia of suburbia: the unchanging past and limitless future in Doraemon’, Japan Forum, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 235-256

Brodwin, E 2016, An Italian surgeon has renewed his promise to perform the world’s first head transplant after a ‘proof-of-concept’ experiment on a dog, Business Insider, viewed April 29th 2017, <http://www.businessinsider.com/italian-surgeon-head-transplant-dog-experiment-2016-9&gt;.

Hardy, MA, Furr, A, Barret, JP, & Barker, JH 2017, ‘Review: The immunologic considerations in human head transplantation’, International Journal of Surgery, vol. 41, pp. 196-202

‘Sails in the Sky’, 1938, Time, vol. 31, no. 18, p. 69.