Watch Lebron James become a 3D work of art (What the Future)

[MUSIC] You're looking at a 3D motion sculpture of NBA superstar Lebron James. [MUSIC] Welcome to What The Future. On today's show, Lebron James like you've never seen him before. A robot performs surgery on human eyes. And an exosuit that lets you run farther on less energy. Alright, check this out. A computer generated this 3D image of King James in motion using standard 2D video. Scientists at MIT call this MoSculp. They essentially generated an algorithm that detects two dimensional key points on the subject. Like the hip or the knee. Then it takes poses from those points and generates these MoSculpts, they can even be 3D printed. Check out this printing of a runner. So imagine you wanna serve like Roger Federer, you could compare your own MoSculpt to this one and see exactly what you're doing differently. Right now the algorithm only reads with a single person, but the team wants to expand that to study multiple subjects at the same time. [MUSIC] All right, would you let a robot operate on your eye? Well, six very brave people did. And I'll let my good friend Dr. Nicks tell you how it went. The operation was Complete success! This marked the first time a robot had performed surgery on a human eye. The robot was designed by Dutch company Preceyes. Play on words, get it? Now in a trial, 12 patients had surgery to remove a membrane from the back of the eye. Now in half the cases, the surgeon used the robot. The other half were done manually. All the surgeries were successful. But in some of the robot assisted cases, the surgeon performed better than usual. Researchers say next, they wanna know if the robots can be used to deliver gene therapy directly to the retina. All right, check out the newest soft exosuit from the engineers at Harvard. It's not the first we've seen with them, but this one has a new feature. It reads how a person's body is responding to the suit and automatically adjust the amount of assistance it gives for maximum efficiency that is tested out US Army soldiers walking 12 miles scores. They use about 15 percent less energy than they would have without the suit. Now accept skeletons like this have a ton of potential beyond helping soldiers in the field Firefighters and other rescuers can use them to navigate rough terrain. Ford has already started using them in auto plants. And CNET's Lexi Sevides got to try out Suit X, and the results? Well, they speak for themselves. Whoa, two point! That's gonna do it for this show. I'm Andy Altman. Thanks for watching. [MUSIC]