I found a really great article this week about “How to make an Imperial AT-AT Walker from Star Wars.” Due to a grassroots movement among fans, attempts may actually be made to construct a real Imperial Walker. The Imperial Walker is “an elephantine four-legged walker used to attack a snowy Rebel Alliance base in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ were officially known as AT-AT walkers, for ‘All Terrain Armored Transport’” (Hsu ¶ 3). People are actually considering all the factors involved in recreating a functioning AT-AT, discussing problems such as structural strength, stress on leg joint (which makes running impossible), and the ease with which they can be knocked down (in contrast to the Big Dog, the Boston Dynamics robot we heard about in class). Despite engineering issues and intellectual property concerns brought up by Lucasfilms, enthusiasm for the project has not waned.
I think the implications of this project are the most interesting part of the article. Basically what’s going on here is that people are recreating a fictional construct in the real world. They are even doing this despite all the difficulties the project is raising, as well as the likely ineffectiveness of an AT-AT. Supporters have to first convince Lucasfilms to allow them to use their intellectual property, and then overcome the engineering difficulties building such a machine presents, and finally deal with what they’re going to do with the Walker. Once they figure out what they’re going to do with it, they then have to deal with both its potential ineffectiveness as well as how functionally incapable it is. I don’t really know what this says about the people that are lobbying so hard to build these AT-AT’s, but it doesn’t look good. The ability to recreate what we see in movies because our technology has finally caught up to our imaginations may not be such a good thing.
It's already been shuttered by George "Childhood Rapist" Lucas, sadly. Besides, the point of the project wasn't to make an AT-AT to deploy somewhere like Afghanistan, it was to make an AT-AT JUST BECAUSE WE CAN.
ReplyDeleteWhat ever happened to doing things just because we can?
I'm all for attempting to replicate movie technology in real life, with limitations. Obviously, constructing a functioning Terminator would probably be a bad idea, but I don't see anything wrong with the AT-AT project.
ReplyDeleteI do think it's interesting that fans of a movie or TV show can use technology to participate more in the subculture. The past few decades have really seen an explosion of "fandoms," especially after the development of the Internet. It's not enough to passively experience a fictitious world, now people need to re-create it in real life. I think it's cool, although I'm probably biased because I'm a huge Star Wars fan.
We watch movies to escape real life. The fantasy world we enter into is entertainment for us. We see this seeping into "real life" with portable DVD players, games and apps on smart phones, and theme parks.
ReplyDeleteThe Harry Potter World at Universal Studios is a good example of this. It fully submerges its visitors into the magical fantastical world of the JK Rowling series. This makes me wonder what the AT-ATs would be used for. If the sole purpose of their creation is entertainment, then there is no harm. If, on the other hand, they are going to be used for, say, national defense, then I agree - it probably is not a good thing.
I think it's a great project for fun, just another obsession for fans to fulfill in real life. I imagine myself working with my father in our backyard to make fairies that fly after watching Fern Gully, but I doubt these projects are being taken-on by a father/mother-son/daughter duo, and wonder what lives these people lead that they can spend multiple hours and countless amounts of cash to create these robots in real life. Doubtlessly though, it contributes to progress and robotics, and who I am to tell people how to spend their precious time and money anyway?
ReplyDeletewhile an at-at would be the sweetest thing since high fructose corn syrup, the practicality of such a behemoth is limited, i mean you need a piece of cable to take it down like in empire strikes back. I did read an interesting article in the same vein in Wired magazine. it was an article on a guy who is nearly done building a mechanical spiderwalker thing that has the operator sit in the middle where all teh legs meet and sits on a rotating seat that directs the machine kind of like a video game. forward of the controls is which ever way the operator is facing so it allows for quit direction changes and more agile movement. that at at would have trouble skittering off to teh left, or even listing lazily (couldn't resist that star wars joke).
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