For years, airlines, touring companies, and tourism boards have used VR technology to market destinations to potential customers. Now, “the impact of COVID-19 may allow it to shake off its image of being a trick to attract public attention, says Ralph Hollister, a tourism analyst at Global Data and author of a report on the VR travel industry.

Virtual travel experiences are seeing a sudden rise in popularity. Still, there’s a big gap between using VR to “try before you buy” and treating virtual reality like the destination itself. Basically, the technology isn’t ready yet. 360-degree VR videos are usually experienced through a headset or an app. The headsets are expensive, heavy, and uncomfortable to wear for more than 30 minutes. The apps have none of these problems but simply aren’t as impressive.

Limited sensations are another problem. The videos focus on sounds and sights but can’t do much with smell, touch, or taste, and VR experiences tend to only be a few minutes long — hardly the equivalent (相等物) of a two-week vacation in Spain.

Erick Ramirez, a philosopher at Santa Clara University who studies VR, compares the future of virtual travel to a classic thought experiment: Imagine that you could connect yourself up to an “experience machine” and simply feel happy forever. Philosopher Robert Nozick, who developed the experiment, thinks nobody would want to be hooked up to (连接到) such a thing. Ramirez says “I do think that there are some kinds of tourist experiences where the value in them is in the doing, not just in the seeing and hearing, and it will be tough for VR to copy.”

If the technology becomes complex enough, those aiming to reduce our carbon footprint might prefer this form of escape. VR travel does bring parts of the world to people who are physically unable to visit certain landmarks. Most of all, it could help bring people to places that are otherwise inaccessible.

Computer scientists at the University of Waterloo have created a device for wearable computer input suitable for many situations. You can control it easily just by touching your fingertips together in different ways. The device, called Tip-Tap, is inexpensive and battery-free through the use of radio frequency identification (RFID)tags to sense when fingertips touch.

The device could，therefore, be added to surgical（外科手术的）gloves, allowing surgeons to access the planning diagrams in an operating room. "One of the many possible applications of the device is in surgeries. What typically happens now with digital operation plans is that an assistant is responsible for navigating（导航）the computer and communicating with the surgeon, but this is slow and difficult," said Daniel Vogel, a professor in Computer Science. "If the surgeon tries to navigate it himself using a touchscreen or a mouse, it's difficult because it would require constant cleaning of the hands. The idea is if you wear Tip-Tap in surgical gloves, surgeons could navigate the computer themselves from where they are, and it won't affect their other actions."

In developing Tip-Tap, the researchers mapped the most comfortable areas on the index finger for people to touch with their thumb, and tested different designs. Following user tests, they solved the problem of making it "battery-free".

"We used this design in two prototype Tip-Tap devices, a glove with a range of four meters and an on-skin tattoo," said Vogel. Such devices are useful for issuing simple commands when a user cannot easily hold an input device, and the usage context is a defined（界定的）area—for example，factory workers，surgeons，or people exercising in a gym. "This is the only device of its kind that we're aware of that doesn't require a battery or wires to make it work."

The world’s most complex biological computer made from a group of engineered cells, could one day be implanted into the body to detect diseases and deliver treatments.

In an early research in 2012, Martin Fussenegger at ETH Zurish in Switzerland and his colleagues engineered two kidney cells to become a biological circuit capable of simple mathematics. One of the cells was able to calculate addition: the presence or absence of each of two chemicals would switch on a reaction inside the cell that would make it shine different colours. The other cell worked in the same way but could subtract amounts. This kind of biological circuit resembles a simple logic circuit in a computer. In theory, it could be used to indicate the presence of an infectious substance while in fact it failed.

Most biological reactions in the body aren’t that simple, though. They rarely rely on “one input and one output”—instead, multiple inputs lead to different outputs. For instance, a high level of calcium in the body in the presence of a specific hormone may suggest one disease, but a high level of calcium along with another hormone might indicate a completely different condition.

To be more practical, biological computer need to be able to perform more complex mathematics. However, it is hard to pack multiple calculations into a single cell. To get around this, Fussenegger and his team have engineered a multicellular system, in which different cells each perform a separate calculation and pass on the results to each other.

The system has nine cells, each containing a biochemical reaction that responds to three chemical inputs—similar to an AND, NOT and OR system in a traditional electronic circuit. These cells coordinate their activities by releasing chemicals that pass from one cell to the other. Together, they form a fully biological circuit that can respond to multiple inputs.

“Although it is not at a stage yet where we can test on animals, we believe it is the most complex biological computer ever assembled,” says Fussenegger. “This work addresses one of the major limitations in synthetic biology(合成生物学)-a lack of programmable devices,” says Angel Goni-Moreno, a synthetic biologist at Newcastle University, UK. He says dial Fussenegger’s multicellular approach enables you to programme the circuit and achieve different calculations just by connecting the nine cells in different configurations(设置).

In the future, a biological computer like this could be used to monitor more complex medical conditions. For example, it could respond to a rise in calcium, a drop in a hormone and an increase in a biomarker, which together would signal the presence of a specific type of cancer, help diagnose it and alert the user to seek appropriate treatment.