For all the giant exploding Death Stars in SciFi, its really the mundane devices that stay with us for years after. Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver, Picard’s replicator, and Spock’s tricorder have at least as much resonance for us as any gigantic space laser that ever turned a plot. In Knight Rider, our resident crime fighters rely pretty heavily on KITT’s ability to find people. He accesses a government database — usually the DMV — and then connects to various surveillance cameras in the area (Knight Rider crooks do tend to like Vegas casinos). The ability to access closed-circuit cameras aside, what’s really amazing here is KITT’s ability to digitally match photos to a moving image. For modern law enforcement and software search companies, that’s something of a holy grail.
Posts Tagged ‘Knight Rider’
Knight Rider: Face Recognition
Knight Rider: 3D Printing
The new Knight Rider series may have flaws, but at least it owns its 80s-era roots. Last night’s episode had all the trappings of the David Hasselhoff original: well-endowed women strolling around in bikinis, a car suffering a fender bender that causes it to explode, and an early-episode use of Turbo Boost, which is pretty much the Knight Rider equivalent of chanting “By the Power of Greyskull!” or “Form Blazing Sword!”
And as in the original show, KITT is conveniently loaded up with whatever gadgetry Michael Knight will need to solve the case. In a throwaway scene in the middle of this episode, Knight and Sarah Graiman (as the resident Babe Mechanic/Scientist that NBC feels we all should have in our lives) are sitting in KITT, pondering how best to steal a car from one of the bad guys. Stealing the car would be much easier if they had the key to the car, so KITT obliges them by by figuring out what key would be needed to open the car and making a software image of it. Then Graiman orders KITT to bust out his 3-D Duplicator. A little box located somewhere in the space that would be occupied by a backseat in a normal car springs to life, a laser starts cutting some kind of material, and voila, Knight gets the key he needs. He even looks suitably impressed at the technology.
