Overview

Since the emergence of Computer Science, the life styles and society conditions of human beings have experienced a huge leap. Till now, computers have been widely used in many fields of human life. At the same time, there has been great development in Biological Science as well. Biology is believed to bring another marvel for the world. With the rapid developments of computer science and biology, the connections between them are getting more and more close, manifested as the emergence of the following events: the processing of biological data through computers, the computational simulation of life activities, and even the researches on man-machine interface. There seems a trend that computer science and biology being combined into one. Thus, we wonder what would happen if we combine the life in the real world with the computer-simulated life in the virtual world. Could it be regarded as a new life form that is half-real and half-virtual?

Meanwhile, virtual-reality devices are the major ways to experience the virtual world, like Google-Glass, Holo-Lens and Xbox. However, no matter how cool they may look like, the core of their working mechanisms is just the sense, like your eye-sight that could communicate with the world. The degree that you feel being involved in the virtual world is too shallow to make you believe that you are experiencing a reality. Therefore, we intend to create a new method that a whole real life system would fuse with a whole virtual life system. That's the concept of Mixed-Reality Cell (MR. Cell). We put forward a whole design to make it come true.

To achieve our goal, we chose oscillation, a typical biological process, to represent life activity. A genetic oscillator was built in E. coli as the real part and an e-oscillator was simulated in a computer as the virtual part. The two parts could interact with each other through an interface device composed of microfluidic chip and chemical/optical modulator. At the beginning, the two oscillators work independently in a dual-reality state. With their interaction, they would gradually adjust to each other without human interference to a strongly coupled and synchronized mixed-reality state.

To reach our goal step by step, our project is divided into three phases, virtual-virtual coupling, mixed-reality in physics and mixed-reality of bio-oscillators. Till now, phase 1 that two e-oscillators coupled with each other and phase 2 that an e-oscillator coupled with a physical oscillator represented by the light intensity change of an LED have all been achieved. What's more, we designed several experiments to test the parts we used, including a hybrid promoter and the Light Controlling system; the results showed that these parts can work well. Also, a prototype of MR. Cell was demonstrated in this project which has great potential in a wide range of the future biological research.