What is The Upgrade?
Part 1: Inspirations
When people ask me what I’m working on generally this is the project I talk about the most. But most people still have trouble understanding the full concept. So in the next few posts, I’ll go over and break down in detail what the upgrade is, why I’m making it, and the history of the concept/idea.
The Origin
I’m gonna start at the beginning, the very beginning. So approximately 13.8 billion years ago everything started. Just kidding, I’m going back but not that far. When I was 4 years old at the tail end of 2005, a show called Ben 10 premiered. It’s a very popular science fiction series that in a different incarnation is still on today. The show revolves around a young boy who one day stumbles upon a watch that he can use to transform into different fictional alien species. He uses the different abilities of the aliens to fight bad guys and save the day.
I loved this show and in the middle of it, another one of my favorite cartoons started airing Phineas and Ferb. A show all about two brothers who create all manner of wild inventions in their own backyard. With the inspiration from that show, I started working on my own transforming watch. Instead of aliens since I couldn’t find any to get DNA samples from. So instead my watch was based on different animal abilities. To my little kid brain, it was simple you just get a computer that can analyze DNA and ascertain which genes are responsible for which traits, and then simply inject that into you. Needless to say, my younger self really didn’t have a firm understanding of how DNA worked. But this idea of a machine that could change your body in a fundamental way on the fly was something that I would come back to often.
About eight years later around 2013, when VR technology was just getting its first big media blitzes another show that had a huge impact on me came out. SAO or Sword Art Online is an extremely popular anime based around the concept of people being trapped in “full drive VR” VR that paralyzes the real body and sends your brain false stimuli to make you think you’re in a VR game. In the show, this is all supposedly done by sending microwaves that stimulate the nerves in your spinal cord and brain. Even with my middle school understanding of the brain, I knew that’s not how microwaves work. So again, I got to work trying to figure out how such a thing would work. I designed a full-body suit that had needles that would intercept your nerve signals and then send back false signals to your brain.
In the summer between middle school, and high school I learned about a growing underground movement call biohacking.
To be continued in Part 2
