An engineering team says that their sperm-injecting robot was the first robot ever to successfully fertilize a human egg. What’s more, that robot is controlled in part by a piece of tech you might find in your very own home–Sony’s DualSense, the controller that comes with the PS5.
“I was calm. In that exact moment, I thought, ‘It’s just one more experiment,’” student engineer Eduard Alba told MIT Technology Review. Alba is part of a team of engineers based in Barcelona who designed the robot and then sent it to New York City to perform the procedure. Those researchers now say that the embryos fertilized by the robot were born as healthy baby girls.
As reported in the piece, this research is part of an ongoing effort by a number of startup companies to automate in vitro fertilization (IVF). Currently, IVF is an expensive procedure that is only available to those who can pay for it, and startups like Overture Life (the company that made the robot) hope to change that. The company has raised about $37 million in funding in order to achieve this goal.
In other DualSense news, PlayStation released its take on the “pro controller” concept earlier this year, the DualSense Edge. In GameSpot’s DualSense Edge review, critic Tamoor Hussain opined that the controller is well-made and feature-rich, but ultimately a luxury that most can live without.
