The kind of shit I get excited about

MoMA is having an exhibit through May 12 called Design and the Elastic Mind. The sheer number and combinations of projects submitted bogs my mind. Some of the projects seem somewhat familiar (e.g., those inspired by science fiction), some are fanciful (e.g., eight things for lonely men, including a machine that steals the covers), and others offer a view of a future that is incipient or happening now. The example most germane to my studies is telepresence.

Telepresence allows a person to operate at a distance in at least one sensory modality (e.g., vision).  The goal is to replace one's input with the sensory details of another location. In essence, the difference between telepresence and virtual reality is that the remote location is not virtual. DARPA and NASA grants started off the process of developing telepresence technologies. (One can easily imagine military applications of this technology.)

Telepresence is an intermediary between present embodiment and virtual embodiment, and it offers me a third possible answer to questions about sensory experiences and embodiment.

Part of what's amazing about it is that surgeons are already using it. In an effort called "Operation Lindberg," Dr. Jacque Marescaux and his team from Institut de recherche contre les cancers de l'appareil digestif (IRCAD) in Paris successfully used telepresence techniques in a laparoscopic cholecystectomy (gall bladder removal) in 2001. (Unfortunately, they performed the operation on 9/7/2001.) Dr. Marescaux operated in New York City on a 68-year-old woman in Strasbourg, France.

It really makes sense. Laparoscopy has been around a long time, and surgeons have been using the technique on humans since roughly 1990. The development of robotic systems like ZEUS allowed what might have been a leap to become a simple step.

The ZEUS system uses robotic arms and a tiny camera in the patient's body. The main surgeon sits at a console, looking at a monitor showing the camera's output and manipulating controls to move the robotic instruments. Systems like these have numerous advantages, not least the abilities to filter out a surgeon's tremble and to scale motions. (One can program the system to reduce a surgeon's motions to a level otherwise impossible for the unaided human hand. Analogues to cinema's effects on vision, anyone?)

If the main surgeon is already looking through a camera and using robotic instruments, the last barrier to clinical robotic assisted remote telepresence surgery (RARTS) is communication lag among the computers, which has since been reduced to thousandths of a second. 

In other words, your doctor can operate on you wherever you are—France, Iraq, space, the bottom of the ocean—provided that the right technology is present. Yet again, technology extends the human sensorium, further complicating embodiment as a concept.

yay!