Not that Star Trek was lacking for an audience to begin with, but it’s now been screened in space, surely spoiling entertainment for astronauts from here on out.
Last week, Paramount Pictures transferred a copy of the movie to NASA’s Houston center, which then uploaded the blockbuster to the International Space Station. Astronaut Michael Barratt then used a laptop to watch it inside the Unity module.
Still no word on whether he found it as uniformly “meh” as we did (well, not all of us).
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Image: Flickr / culture.culte
Put on Paul Lemmens’ made-to-vibrate jacket while you’re watching Slumdog Millionaire, and you’ll feel Jamal’s anxiety as he struggles to find the correct answers. While this jacket won’t mimic the hits in The Wrestler or, thankfully, the bullets in The Matrix, it purports to physically connect viewers to movies by literally sending shivers up their spines.
Philips Electronics unveiled the “motor-studded” jacket at the World Haptics Conference in Salt Lake City in March. It consists of a vibrating device that will let movie buffs empathize with onscreen characters, by letting viewers feel the tense situations when neuroimpulses are sent from their skin to their brains.
The jacket works like this: It’s powered with an array of small motors that send vibrations to 64 actuators spaced throughout the jacket. Controlled by four microprocessors, vibrations are sent to eight actuators spaced evenly down each sleeve and four placed on the front and back of the torso to give the person an illusion that he is being touched all over.
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