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Comment by DrScientist | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a demo of using MS hololens to tell a scientist where to pipette something.

Just put the plates on a liquid handling robot - stop trying to treat the person as a robot.

The other aspect - the human -> computer ( as oppose to the computer -> human ) interface is interesting - it sort of reminds me of the first multi-touch demos.

ie exploring how best for humans to communicate intent to computers - though again - a bit like the example above around automation - in my view the best UI is no or less UI!

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I assume most wet labs have robots that do part of the workflow. But they are mostly useful for automating repetitive tasks, and need a lot of setup before they can get to work.

For small experiments, when setup is 90% of doing the job, then you just don't win much by letting a robot do the remaining 10%.

From what I can tell, at least for academic wet labs, robots seem fairly unavailable/unaffordable.

The university lab I interned in had a 96 well pipetting robot that was shared between a few research groups. I never used it. I think it was mostly useful if you wanted to do an experiment many times with varying parameters. But for most of the stuff we did, the steps were just not repetitive enough that programming a robot would make sense.

Also, there are usually a lot of steps between the pipetting that the pipetting robot couldn't do like loading stuff in a centrifuge, checking DNA concentration, putting it in the PCR machine, etc.

Not your typical liquid handlers sure - but advances in robotics like Robocat type things should mean you could build a much more general robot that could operate much more like a human in a chain of tasks.

That true - but then they won't be able to use this either.....

Set up is in two parts.

Programming the robot, and putting the and register the reagents and source material.

Given that they can produce instructions for humans, I don't see why they could produce instructions of the robot ( with perhaps some human instructions for making the reagents and source material etc available ).

A lot of traditional liquid handling robots are large and have relatively large buffer tanks etc - so need flushing etc etc. But I don't see why you could use something like RoboCat to be much more flexible for simple container to container pipetting.

Interesting. What are some good examples of computer -> human interface?

Depends on what you are trying to do.

One interface I think is quite good is the spreadsheet - ( and I'm not talking horrible ribbons or poor charting - I'm talking about the core concept of a reactive grid of cells ).

You enter numbers and the computer immediately updates the results - the cells updating is the computer -> human interface, but it feels almost invisible as part of the task. The user has a mental model of how the spreadsheet works and treats it almost like a real world object.

You get a similar effect with the drawing/painting tools which use touch.

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