Artificial Skin Creation Credited to Luke Skywalker
By George Robbins
We all know by now that the ‘Star Wars‘ franchise has had long lasting affects on society especially when it comes to the subject of pop culture. Pop culture dominates almost everything we see going on around us and it determines what a lot of people end up doing in their lives. The original ‘Star Wars’ trilogy that started all of it changed the course of society in some aspects, thus changing the lives of many different individuals. In the original trilogy, Luke Skywalker takes precedence as the main character of the story and we see his journey to learn about who he is and what he can do. The story of Luke’s journey completely changed everything as it introduced entirely new concepts to the world at large.
In the second film of the original trilogy, ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ Luke has already gone headway into his journey and partially learned to use the Force. This mystical power is something that allows people access to all sorts of abilities and he starts learning how to use them in this film. By the end of ‘A New Hope‘ Luke started learning how to wield it, but ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ sees him trying to master it to some degree. His journey eventually culminates in a confrontation with the Sith Lord that he believed responsible for his father’s death, Darth Vader. Through that confrontation at the end of the film, he learns that Darth Vader is actually his father.
During their confrontation, Luke ends up in despair from not only finding out that his greatest enemy is also his father, but because he also loses an arm. His lost arm makes it impossible to continue fighting the man he now knows is his father and he has to make a hasty retreat. He manages to escape from the Cloud City that they were on and he is picked up by his friends as they are getting ready to escape from the planet. It is at this point that we see something interesting with his getting a new hand. In order to make up for the arm he had lost, a new robotic arm is made. This arm makes it possible for him to once again resume his training and finally confront his father one last time.
The interesting thing about his arm is that mention of it is never really brought up again. One part of this is because robotics limbs are mostly normalized in the Star Wars canon and the other part is the fact that it is covered in skin. Unlike anything that was really seen in media before, we saw him get a new hand that looked exactly like the one that had been lost. It was a robotic hand covered in artificial skin that he was able to touch things with. Without this loss of senses, he was still able to keep up with his foes in combat. Researchers in Singapore have developed artificial skin aimed to help those with prosthetic limbs regain the sensation of touch and they claim that the biggest inspiration for this was Luke’s arm in the Star Wars franchise. Though still in the experimental stages, it could open up a whole new world for prosthesis and for robotics.