As I work towards writing new content for this new iteration of the website, I'd like to take this opportunity to re-upload some of my older work. I had a few short articles about fictional tech and their real-life counterparts on my old site, some of which I thought were valuable enough to try and save. At the very least, it provides a glimpse into my writing from a few years ago. So without further adieu, Iron Man's B.A.R.F.
With the Spider-Man: Homecoming dropping in just one week I, naturally, re-binged on every MCU release to date (yes even The Incredible Hulk). With Marvel on the mind I figured it would be a great time to talk about some of the cool tech shown in just about every movie, but I remained determined to find something to talk about in Captain America: Civil War because of its strong ties to what we’ll be seeing in Spidey’s return to the big screen. My biggest problem though was in actually finding some cool new gadget in Civil War. Spider-Man’s new web shooters may be a bit too “on the nose”, Black Panther’s entire suit is made of a fictional metal, and I’ve been saving cryogenics for my super secret Austin Powers arti—dammit! But then it hit me… between the tension of the Sokovia Accord, the long awaited clash at the airport, and the legendary fight between Captain America and Iron-Man, I completely forgot about a rather stunning entry to the Marvel Tech Arsenal: Tony Stark’s B.A.R.F.
The Gadget:
Very early on in the movie, we see Tony Stark giving the Honour’s Speech at MIT where he presents his B.A.R.F. before an audience of grad students. Standing for Binarily Augmented Retro Framing, an acronym I really hope he keeps, the device is an implant in a pair of glasses which can “hijack the hippocampus” to not only capture and project memories but alter them to the user’s pleasure. Tony specifically uses the device to re-experience and change his last interaction with his parents before their unexpected death.
B.A.R.F. essentially re-creates a traumatic memory from your past and gives you the chance to get some closure. Why stop there though? Why not also re-create and re-live pleasant memories? Or any memory? The possibilities for Iron-Man’s latest tech are endless, and while it’s hard to say if we’ll see it appear again in the MCU, the novelty of seeing a young Robert Downey Jr on screen again automatically makes this a noteworthy scene (suppresses urge to re-watch Chaplin).
The Reality:
Now, of course, the first thing to note is that Marvel, Iron-Man specifically, is no stranger to a little bit of augmented reality. Every Iron-Man movie has a lot of it, as do both Avengers films. One of these days I’ll sit down and really break down the interfaces and projections all over Stark Industries, I promise, but for this round, the really unique tech is the (I’m assuming) chip that runs B.A.R.F; the device that can read in memories from your brain wirelessly. While normally it would take bulky EEGs to monitor brain activity, this sort of tech is actually around today. Enter Emotiv, a San Francisco-based bioinformatics company that specializes in devices that read in brain waves using portable EEGs. The Insight is mostly used for easy monitoring leaning towards exercise and meditation, and the immensely more powerful EPOC+ is used for primarily for research. Both devices are currently used to detect emotional states and receive mental commands, allowing the user to say control a computer mouse, switch songs on Spotify or even control a character in the games with built-in support for the Insight.
As for reading memories… that’s where we run into some problems. The brain can be very difficult sometimes, often throwing curve balls at researchers and developers working on studying it. Memories are housed inside of the hippocampus, a very small segment located near the center of the brain. Because the rest of the brain is still active, picking up any sort of activity from there can be near-impossible because of all the activity around it. Currently, Emotiv’s hardware is able to detect activity from the entire outer region of the brain, so as the tech improves and developers find ways of reading signals from even deeper in the brain, there may soon come a day where we can actually view memories stored within our minds. While Tony Stark stated that B.A.R.F. cost $611 million to make, through Emotiv we could see something very similar, all for the much lower cost of $300 for the Insight.
If you find this kind of thing particularly awesome, be sure to check out Emotiv’s website where they do a more in-depth breakdown of the science behind their devices as well as guides on developing on them.
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