Innovation Sighting: The Multiplication Template and Virtual Reality

People are fascinated with the idea of human cloning after researchers cloned a sheep in 1997.  The debate about the risks and benefits of human cloning rages on.  What if you could clone yourself in a virtual sense?  Even better, imagine cloning yourself into another person's body?  What would you feel?  What would you learn?  How would your life be better?

Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist from Karolinska Institute in Sweden, has pioneered a method of allowing us to get out of our bodies and into the body of someone else...virtually...so that you sense whatever the other person senses.  We "clone" ourselves everyday with simple technologies like a mirror or camera. But this is different.  This technique clones you into another form so you can experience life from that point-of-view.  From CNN: 

This is an example of the innovation template, Multiplication.  It works by taking a component of a product or service, then creating copies of it that are different in some way.  Using SOLUTION-TO-PROBLEM innovation, we imagine potential benefits of the hypothetical solution.  Dr. Ehrsson believes this technique could help us improve our self-esteem.  It might help amputees put a sense of feeling into a prosthetic limb.  Or it might help us identify with other cultural, racial, or gender groups by "living" in their bodies.

This last idea is particularly intriguing.  Imagine you had the ability to mandate when someone else uses the technique to become YOU.  You would use this is critical situations when it is essential the other person understands your point-of-view: spouse, lawyer, negotiating partner, customer, boss, etc.  The ultimate cloning experience is not making another copy of yourself, but rather having others clone to become you.

 

Comments

[michael cardus]

This technology and the idea of where "you" exist is one of episemology challenge. If you are you in a virtual world then where is the real you? is the real you the you who is standing and controlling the machine? or is the real you the you who is inside the machine? you cannot be two places at once otherwise what constitutes you?

I agree this tool may be helpful in changing perceptions of ideas, although so can books.

[Drew]

Thanks, Michael. I agree this idea is a bit futurisitc, and the technology will have a long way to go to address your questions. It is not clear to me either how this would work being in two places. I like the example for its approach as "technology looking for a problem that it solves."