A Buggy Perspective

by Ziya Tong     Department: Correlations

When I was little, my concept of infinity was that our entire twinkling universe fit neatly inside of God's belt buckle. And standing next to God of course, was his Mum. From that world I'd zoom out again past their stars and suns and solar system, until all of that space fit inside a bigger God's belt buckle, who lived in a bigger world, with his bigger Mum. Infinity to my 5 year old mind, was essentially worlds existing endlessly & simultaneously within bigger worlds, and of course, bigger belt buckles.

I was reminded of this today as I stumbled across an interesting project called Animal Superpowers via We-Make-Money-Not-Art.com. Design students Kenichi Okada and Chris Woebken have created "sensory enhancement" toys for children that allow them to empathize with animals by changing their perspective. For example, kids experience what it's like to be an Ant by wearing an apparatus that magnifies their vision 50x through microscope antennas on their hands. Other prototypes in the works include the perspective of being a Bird (gaining a sense for magnetic fields), an Elephant (shoes that pick up transmitting vibrations) and an Electric Eel (enhanced spatial vision).

An Ant's Eye View










So what do animal superpower perspectives and a child's vision of the universe have in common? For one answer, let's turn to theoretical physicist, Brian Greene.

Tags: animal, Brian Greene, perspective, physics, superpowers, Ziya Tong