Your eyes, your ears, your nose are your sensors.

And what I'm trying to do is to give technology

eyes, ears, and nose.And what I'm trying to do is to give technology eyes, ears, and nose. We
think, traditionally, of having our five senses. You've got hearing, which helps you to be aware,
especially when driving. Smell is our passive safety sense. If there's a fire in this place, the first
way you're gonna know about it is with smell. Your sense of touch. You can feel the air moving
over your skin. You maybe feel that you're falling.Your sense of taste is your tongue, and once I
say that you're like, well, of course. And your eyes. You're so visual, it's so important to you,
right? Because for you, it's how you navigate the world. So we're trying to make robots to
operate in a human world. But it becomes natural to outfit it with the senses that we use to
navigate that world every day. And as you begin to develop, you know, sensors for technology, I
have to go beyond the basic five senses to build my research. We can talk about sense of
direction. You, as a person, do that with your eyes. Just say, where is the sun in the sky? So,
the GPS chip, which is a sensor that's measuring radio signals coming in, and figuring out
where you are. Sense of time is another one I love to talk about. If you think about it with the cell
phone, you know how I'll grab an excuse like, why are we late; well,my watch was wrong.
They're on the network, they're all synchronized, and we all know what time it is. And it's
changed thing.
I think people get get places more promptly than
they used to. Sense of balance is one of the most important things we have. Now, you as a
person know which way is up. An accelerometer is a sensor. It's used to measure motion, and to
measure which way is up. So, when you turn your screen on your phone,it's the accelerometer
that knows which way is up. A gyroscope, it's basically a mechanism that canvmeasure a twist.
So, as you move a device that has a gyroscope in it, it can tell its orientation. This is a robot. It
has accelerometers in there. It has the gyroscopes in there. It has the pressure sensor in there.
It has an ultrasonic sensor in there. All of those are coming together to allow this to perfectly
hold its position here off the ground.So, sensors can be not necessarily a physical, silicon
quantity that I make.

There are metasensors that are beyond that. We can talk about the sense of humor. It's one of
our most innate things, and we love to stimulate it.
And we love to record it. So, the best sensor I have for a sense of humor is the Like button. If
they pass it on to their friends; it was probably pretty funny, right? You know, it's one of those
things. And so, as we begin to bring digital technology to operate or move around our world, it's
the sensors that are creating this content that we are actually going to feed into our senses to
recreate that experience.

Virtual reality is really a great demonstrator for how the sensors have to come together as our
interface into driving the simulation, the virtual reality. You could imagine a virtual world, you
know, you like to track your physical movements in the real world, and so the ultrasonic
technology gives a distance measurement in three dimensional space.
And so that works together with the gyroscope,
which gives relative, angular changes, and the accelerometer, which gives relative linear
changes,
to give a more accurate representation of any
peripheral, relative to the head mounted display.
Your way you move through the world right now
is you use your sensors. And as we begin in this age of robotics, we're trying to outfit that with
the sensors to help it move around the real world.
At the same time, we're using sensors to digitize the world around us, to create a virtual world
so people can share these experiences. And that's really what the sensors is about.It's bridging
the gap between the real world and the virtual world.
It's just fun to be on that edge, that boundary
between these two things, and just to see where it's gonna take us.