14 DAY TRIAL // It is no big news that plants are highly sensitive organisms, which respond to virtually all changes occurring in their environmental conditions and to being touched by various other life-forms.
However, a new interaction platform, Botanicus Interacticus, takes things one step further and shows us that artificial plants can be designed in such a manner that they behave just like their all-natural counterparts.
Brought to us by Disney's Pittsburgh research center, this new technology basically places an electronic sensor in the soil of your average, run-of-the-mill plant and then uses the data collected in this manner to develop artificial plants whose responses to touch are virtually the same as their models'.
More precisely, Botanicus Interacticus identifies and breaks down the pathways which are responsible for transmitting electrical signals within natural plants, and then recreates them and puts them back in place within artificial plants using electrical components.
Slash Gear reports that these copycats of actually living and breathing plants, together with their natural counterparts, can even be linked to a display, allowing people to see exactly what happens within a plant when touched in various ways.
Given the fact that natural plants could not stand so much human interaction, be it for scientific purposes or not, the same source argues that these life-like artificial ones could very well be used to show people how it is that the natural world responds when handled and manipulated.
The video below shows how, through the Botanicus Interacticus technology, people can up-grade the way they interact with plants, and how these interactions can be used to create artificial ones. As you can see, the plant is quick to respond not just to grasping and holding, but also to simple touches along its stem.
In all fairness, having such artificial living things around us might seem a bit odd for the time being, but at the rate at which technology is developing nowadays nobody can say for sure what the future will bring.
