50 years of Star Trek inspires innovations in mobile computers, speech recognition and tricorders

“Commander Spock and Captain James T. Kirk, played by Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner, pictured here in The Original Series” by NBC Television. Public domain.

On September 8th, 1966, the American broadcast network NBC aired the first episode of Star Trek, a science fiction television series conceived by Gene Roddenberry. In the decades which have followed, the original series which only lasted three seasons inspired a growing list of additional series and feature films, making a huge impact on both science fiction and pop culture.

As the 50th anniversary of the first Star Trek episode comes around this September, fans around the world continue to be fascinated by the adventures of the crew of the USS Enterprise and the rest of the Starfleet as they explore space, the final frontier. Early August saw the 15th annual Star Trek Las Vegas convention where stars from the original series and cosplaying fans express their admiration for the show and its futuristic vision of a world where differences are explored and not feared. In Scotland, a free September 10th screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan will bring many fans to a 600-year old castle in Linlithgow, the Scottish town from which Enterprise crew member Scotty hails. This summer saw the release Star Trek Beyond, the latest addition to the franchise’s canon of movies. In January 2017, Star Trek: Discovery will become the newest TV series in the Star Trek franchise when it becomes available on CBS All Access, so the Star Trek universe will continue to expand in the future.

One of the more interesting aspects of Star Trek is just how much of the show’s science fiction has become technological reality. Earlier this year, we profiled the discovery of spinel, a material which closely resembles the transparent aluminum which played a large role in the 1986 movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. With 50 years of scientific progress haven taken place since the first Star Trek episode aired, many of the technological wonders created for television and movies have either become commonplace or are being seen on the horizon of research and development.

Star Trek PADD Presages the Rise of Mobile Computing

Star Trek: The Next Generation began its seven-year run in 1987, showing the adventures of the USS Enterprise under the direction of Jean-Luc Picard who was portrayed by British actor Patrick Stewart. It was the series which introduced viewers to the Personal Access Display Device (PADD), a handheld computing device used by Starfleet and others. Crew manifests, diagnostic reports and other data could be input through a touch-sensitive screen powered by printed circuit boards and were generally rectangular in shape.

Most people watching The Next Generation or any of the following series in which PADDs were used would very quickly recognize that the devices closely resemble the tablet computers which have been commercialized over the past decade, most notably the iPad developed by consumer tech company Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) of Cupertino, CA. Personal digital assistants (PDAs) had already become a popular piece of consumer gadgetry through the 1990s but they lack the touchscreen interfaces which have been realized both by tablet computers as well as smartphones.

Interestingly, budget constraints appear to be a major reason why PADDs incorporated a large touchscreen and mainly utilized software-definable functions. Ars Technica reports that, compared to the Star Trek movies, the television series did not have large art budgets. The use of a large screen without control knobs and on which colored sheets could be displayed as the computer interface was a cheap option for creating a believable mobile computing platform.

The Replicator: An Early Vision of 3D Printing

The Next Generation also introduced Star Trek fans to the replicator, a piece of technology which could produce food for consumption, mechanical parts for repairs and just about any other object imaginable, except for fatal poisons. Replicators used transporter technology which improved upon the performance of food synthesizers from the original series by dematerializing matter to get rid of waste and then rematerializing matter in its requested form.

3D printers may be a step behind replicators in terms of transportation technology but we do live in a world in which programmable printing devices can be sent instructions to create objects from toys to electronic components to food. This February, scientists at Wake Forest University announced that they had created a transplantable organ which was 3D printed. Edible printing filaments are used by the Foodini, developed by Natural Machines of Barcelona, Spain, which connects to cloud-based recipe sites so users can select their dinner.

The waste reductions realized by 3D printing is also having an impact on the manufacturing sector, where the technology is known as additive manufacturing. American automaker Ford Motors (NYSE:F) and Chicago-based Boeing Company (NYSE:BA) were recently announced as partners with 3D printing developer Stratasys (NASDAQ:SSYS) of Eden Prairie, MI, and will incorporate Stratasys’s 3D printing platforms into their manufacturing processes. Global spending on 3D printing tech is expected to reach $26.7 billion in 2019 according to the International Data Corporation.

Real-World Tricorders Provide Handheld Data Analysis Tools

Tricorders, handheld devices which help Starfleet crew members detect atmospheric and biological data in unknown locales, appeared as early as the original Star Trek series in the 1960s. Star Trek tricorders are multipurpose and some versions have been finely tuned to detect diseases in the human body or to aid in starship engineering. Although tricorders may have different purposes, every tricorder achieves three functions: sensing conditions, computing the data and then recording that data.

The first manmade device marketed as a tricorder was the TR-107 Mark 1, a device first released in 1996 by the now-defunct Vital Technologies Corporation. It was capable of measuring electromagnetic fields and offered other components including a clock, a timer, a thermometer and a barometer. Outside of this, there have been some limited developments on the road towards a true functioning tricorder. Late last year, media outlets were reporting on research out of Stanford University which could result in a medical tricorder which can detect tumors within a human body from up to a foot away. Verily, the life sciences arm of tech conglomerate Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL), has also announced its work on a cancer-detecting tricorder, although development of that project seems to have stalled in recent months.

Natural Language Speech Processing, From the USS Enterprise to Your Pocket

From the earliest days of Star Trek, Captain Kirk and other crew members of the USS Enterprise could communicate with the ship’s computer through voice command. The technology conceived by Roddenberry and other Star Trek writers was very sophisticated and handled natural language speech interactions with ease. Those with a great deal of Star Trek trivia knowledge are probably already aware that the voice of the computer in most of the series and movies was provided by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, the wife of Gene Roddenberry.

Research into speech recognition technologies extends all the way back to Bell Labs in the 1950s but it’s only in recent years that commercially successful software systems for voice commands have been developed. In October 2011, Apple added the voice recognition technology known as Siri to its iOS mobile devices. Some reports indicate that an iOS update this September will be the first to connect Siri to a deep neural network to improve Siri’s sentence recognition and make her speech sound more human.

Natural language processing is also achieved by the Watson cognitive computing system developed by American tech powerhouse IBM (NYSE:IBM). Although Watson cannot hold conversations like Siri or the USS Enterprise’s computer, its ability to process language to perform computing tasks is impossible to ignore here. This April, officials from Watson’s development team reportedly announced that Watson was capable of processing languages in the English language with a 6.9 percent word error rate, down from a previous 8 percent word error rate.