For The Day After Tomorrow

San Jose’s Tech Museum of innovation is an ode to ingenious technology

- Preeti Verma Lal

One step inside the orange walls of The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California, technology acquires a futuristic slant. Incredible ideas backed by factual research see fruition: dogs will detect cancer in humans, walls will be built of mushroom bricks, preferred traits will be picked from the DNA helix to create humans, synthetic microbes will be mixed and matched to make new organisms, and wearable technology combined with data collection and analysis will forecast its owner’s physical and emotional quotients.

In the heart of the Silicon Valley, The Tech—as the museum is affectionately called—has teamed with the area’s highest profile companies to bring to the public the newest technology in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality and mixed reality. Sprawled over a 1,32,000-square-foot facility designed by Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta, the museum is divided into several galleries, with names like Reboot Reality, Social Robots, Bio Design Studio, Innovation in Health Care, and Cyber Detectives. A curious mind could spend hours with The Tech’s interactive exhibits; among them are a pudgy robot with silken hair that says hello, face mash-ups on a wall that make kids giggle, and an

IMAX theatre, where the Freestyle app helps dispense custom soda blends.