As Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise on the original Star Trek of the 1960s, actor William Shatner came face-to-face with many fictional technologies, from warp drives to communicators, super-intelligent computers to fiendish robots. Then, as the twentieth century was coming to a close in the 1990s, Shatner suddenly found himself face-to-face with such real-world technologies as cell phones, personal computers, and the World Wide Web.
“I couldn’t help but notice a certain familiarity in the technological leaps I was witnessing all around me,” Shatner explains in I’m Working on That: A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact, published in 2002. “It was a kind of déjà vu. And as with all déjà vus, I couldn’t put my finger on it. But after some shower-stall rumination, it hit me – every day the world was becoming more and more like… Star Trek! Not that I saw people walking around on the decks of Starships and not that I had encountered many Klingons lately, except on the floor of Star Trek conventions, but I sensed that there was this decided Trekian trend rippling through the world as we prepared to turn the corner on the twenty-first century.”
William Shatner subsequently made contact with Chip Walter – a former university professor who lives in the Pittsburgh area – to collaborate on I’m Working on That. As part of their investigation into the growing connection between Star Trek and the modern world, the pair traveled across the country, visiting cutting-edge research facilities and talking with leading scientists and engineers to discover if such Star Trek-like technologies as transporters, warp drives, and computerized implants were potentially on the horizon.
The journey inevitably led them to the Steel City and Carnegie Mellon University, not once but on three separate occasions. During the first, Shatner met with Dan Siewiorek of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Francine Gemperle of CMU’s Wearable Computing Group, part of the university’s Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES). Remembering the tricorder of the original Star Trek and how “communicators” had shrunk to the size of a Starfleet insignia by the time The Next Generationpremiered, Shatner wondered if computers and cell phones might someday be similarly miniaturized.
As fate would have it, ICES was already investigating whether modern technology could fit onto the human body in ways that were accessible, comfortable, and even stylish.
“Part of Star Trek’s popularity derives from its cool style, and therein lies a lesson,” Shatner writes in I’m Working on That. “Even if you can create wearables that are as comfortable as a bed of Tribbles and work better than Scotty’s warp engines, they had better look good, or forget it. Which is why I like the final phase of the work I saw at Carnegie Mellon’s ICES. They call it Streetware. The Streetware project took the whole concept of wearables, with all of its usability and human anatomy issues, and laid them out before a gaggle of Carnegie Mellon design students. Since CMU also happens to have produced some of the nation’s top industrial designers, applying the talents of design students to the problem of style seemed like a good match.”
Next up for William Shatner and Chip Walter were robots and artificial intelligence. “I have personally grappled with so many smart-aleck robots, computers, and androids over the years that I’m sick to death of them,” Shatner observed. “Remember V’Ger in Star Trek:
The Motion Picture, hell-bent on the destruction of pretty much everything? And the M5 multitronic computer created by Dr. Richard Daystrom which was supposed to replace my crew. That SOB had the gall to relegate me to the status of Captain Dunsel (a Starfleet midshipman’s term for a part that serves no purpose). But I had the last laugh. When it started acting up and nearly wiped out 500 Starfleet personnel, I outsmarted it and it self-destructed.”
The robot creations of Hans Moravec at Carnegie Mellon University gave William Shatner less trouble than those encountered by his alter ego, and the robotics professor was more than happy to share his thoughts on the future, going so far as to suggest that an android like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation could potentially become reality by the mid twenty-first century.
“Really!” Shatner exclaims within the pages of I’m Working on That. “Data by 2050. Not even Gene Roddenberry would have predicted that! In fact Data doesn’t show up until 2335.”
According to Moravec, technological progress is moving at an exponential rate. As a result, the obstacles that currently prevent the creation of a functioning robot with human-like qualities will fade away within a relatively short period of time. Shatner refers to it as the Tribble Effect, after the classic Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” in which a small furry creature reproduces itself at such an alarming rate that the entire USS Enterprise is overrun with them in a matter of days.
If Data is possible within the next few decades, what about another staple of Star Trek: The Next Generation – the Holodeck? For that answer, William Shatner and Chip Walter paid a visit to Randy Pausch and Don Marinelli, co-directors of the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center. Upon entering the department’s virtual reality lab, Shatner was immediately outfitted with a helmet-like device filled with sensory displays and suddenly found himself transported back to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise from the original 1960s Star Trek. Although the imagery was three dimensional and realistic, however, the lack of additional Starfleet officers made it a rather solitary affair.
“This is just a simple demonstration,” Randy Pausch explained. “Something we threw together over the weekend. Creating virtual places is actually relatively easy. Creating virtual people, that’s something else.”
The major problem is the processing power of current day computers. Every time Shatner turned his head with the virtual reality helmet fully in place, a computer program calculated the movements, redrew the images he was seeing to reflect the new angle and perspective, and then fed those images to the visual device within the headpiece. Adding “virtual humans” that are meant to interact adds complexities to the programming that take longer to reconfigure.
“The kind of raw computing power needed to conjure a digital reality that is so full-blooded that it is indistinguishable from the true and authentic thing is not possible, not today, not yet,” Pausch said. “Even when it comes to visual images, we’re a ways off from the Holodeck.”
By his own admission, William Shatner is not a “tech guy,” one of the reasons he asked Pittsburgher Chip Walter to co-author I’m Working on That: A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact. The numerous stories within the pages of the finished book, however, demonstrate that not only are modern day scientists and engineers influenced by the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and his crew, the same holds true for the technologies of the present and future as well.
With the work currently underway at Carnegie Mellon University – and other cutting-edge facilities across the country – the world envisioned by Gene Roddenberry may become reality sooner than anyone expected.
Anthony Letizia