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Scientists Plan to Shake Hands Via Internet
reuters.com ^ | October 28, 2002 06:04 PM ET | Reuters

Posted on 10/28/2002 3:34:05 PM PST by Nachum

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists in Britain and the United States will try to shake hands on Tuesday.

No big deal one might think -- only they will be 5,000 km (3,000 miles) apart, using the Internet to connect them.

In a technological first, they will use pencil-like devices called phantoms to recreate the sense of touch across the Atlantic, organizers of the experiment said.

The phantoms send small impulses at very high frequencies down the Internet using newly developed fiber optic cables and extremely high bandwidths.

When a scientist in London prods a screen with the phantom, the sensation should be felt by a colleague in Boston, and vice versa.

"Pushing on the pen sends data representing forces through the Internet that can be interpreted by a phantom and therefore felt on the other end," said Mel Slater, Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL).

"You can not only feel the resulting force, but you can also get a sense of the quality of the object you're feeling -- whether it's soft or hard, wood-like or fleshy."

UCL will conduct the experiment on Tuesday with colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Two scientists -- one in London and one in Boston -- will try to pick up a cube between them and move it, each responding to the force the other exerts on it.

The secret behind the technology is the speed at which the successive impulses are sent -- up to 1,000 Hertz," UCL said in a statement.

"In much the same way that the brain re-interprets still images into moving pictures, the frequencies received by the phantom are similarly integrated to produce the sense of a continuous sensation," it said.

The implications of the experiment could be vast, said UCL, which describes the event as the world's "first transatlantic handshake over the Internet."

If successful, it could allow people to touch and feel each other over the Internet.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Front Page News
KEYWORDS: shakehands
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To: Nachum
Let the sensual harassment suits begin.
41 posted on 10/28/2002 5:42:21 PM PST by Consort
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To: Tree of Liberty
If they could combine this technology with an electron microscope and manually manipulate the cohesiveness of particles we'd be jammin'!!

Med tech would be pretty awesome too!
42 posted on 10/28/2002 5:45:47 PM PST by JoeSixPack1
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To: JoeSixPack1; Tree of Liberty
You think technology is stupid?

No. I've been working as an electronic engineer for 19 years.
I'm feeling seriously burnt out, and I am not happy with being taxed to death, as well as a number of other things which I will not mention.

My post was inappropriate for the thread. I apologize.
I will refrain from posting to FR when in such a depleted, non-optimal state.
I really must sleep now. Good night.

43 posted on 10/28/2002 5:54:44 PM PST by XLurk
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To: Nachum
If successful, it could allow people to touch and feel each other over the Internet.

Net porn just got a boost (as if it needed one).

44 posted on 10/28/2002 5:55:22 PM PST by Junior
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To: PJ-Comix
Here is a list of people I would like to "touch" with this gizmo:...

HAHAHAHA...now here's a man who knows what he wants!

45 posted on 10/28/2002 6:12:50 PM PST by DakotaGator
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To: Tree of Liberty
Sounds pretty useful to me.

Yeah, but I'm still thinking about those prurient uses.

46 posted on 10/28/2002 6:19:29 PM PST by PJ-Comix
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To: DakotaGator
So who do I call for this ultra broadband connection?

How much will it cost?

Should I buy telecom stocks?

Can I get this through AOL?

Does anyone have Britney's modem number?

47 posted on 10/28/2002 6:32:06 PM PST by Wingy
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To: Wingy
And a new dotCom is born!
48 posted on 10/28/2002 6:48:44 PM PST by DakotaGator
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To: Tree of Liberty
The problem with using any long-distance technology for fine manual manipulations is the communication delay.

(In control theory, it's called transport delay and it limits the achievable performance of feedback control systems.)

Not only do the users need frequent updates of the forces and positions (the article mentions 1000/second), but the system also needs to minimize the round trip time for a force to be propagated across the channel and for its resisting force to be propagated back.

I estimate that you can't do fine manual work with delays of any more than, say, a twentieth of a second. And even then, you'll have to learn to work through the system, mainly by slowing down somewhat.

The internet is not useful for this application because of the round trip delays. Not only are they too big, they're statistically uncertain.

Now, if you're going to do this job with brute force communication speed, you'll have to have a dedicated circuit, the most direct possible route (no satellite links!), and the lowest-overhead messaging protocol. So if you are using this approach and you want a surgeon in Sydney to operate on a patient in Topeka, I think you'd need a dedicated fiber optic line running directly through the center of the earth.

Another alternative, which I suspect they're working on, is to give each participant near-immediate locally generated feedback, based on a model of what's on the other end. The resulting force feedback would be modified by later-arriving data actually coming from the remote end. The model itself would be incrementally constructed in real time, being very rough at first and then getting better as the user continued to 'operate.'

But the construction of the model is quite problematic, especially when the object on the other end is connected to an essentally unmodelable nervous system.

IMHO, a problem nearly comparable to that of AI.

<)B^)

49 posted on 10/28/2002 7:35:49 PM PST by Erasmus
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To: Nachum
If successful, it could allow people to touch and feel each other over the Internet.

Would give cyber-sex a new meaning!

50 posted on 10/28/2002 8:26:14 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
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To: PJ-Comix
6. Sophia Loren (Any way to make the settings of this device so that the chix will feel as they appeared 40 years ago?)

Does it matter?

51 posted on 10/28/2002 8:30:40 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
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To: PJ-Comix
I wanna touch Petra Verkaik but it isn't her hand I wanna grab.

I vote for Roberta Vasquez, who was in the first (and only) issue I ever owned (bought it off an older kid when I was 8, 1984).

52 posted on 10/28/2002 9:41:39 PM PST by Clemenza
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To: billorites
It's there. I remember Howard Stern talking (couple years ago) about a network where users could remotely manipulate each other's "devices"...And why did the joystick industry add feedback to their wares???
53 posted on 10/28/2002 9:43:16 PM PST by evolved_rage
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To: weikel
Am I the only one old enough to remember programs like "ROXANNE"?

I'm talking back in the day when we'd punch programs on cards, compile them and then put them through a card reader. If you were lucky and the gods smiled, after a few hours wait you'd get a printout of a nekkid woman done in ASCII. It would be a couple of pages you'd hang on a wall, then move back a few feet and squint to see it.

Those gals got lots of us geeks through lonely nights back in 1968-69!

Of course we were >supposed< to be making pictures of Snoopy or other cartoon characters, but we saw the possibilities right away.

And of course it spawned a race to see who could make the best picture! In the 70's I was printing them out with my Tandy COCO through a 3" wide 4 color inkpen printer. Color brought a whole new dimension to the ...uhhh..art.

Wish I could find some of those old programs now...sigh. Maybe I'll try to ressurect the COCO and dig through the files.

prisoner6

54 posted on 10/29/2002 12:10:41 AM PST by prisoner6
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To: Clemenza
I vote for Roberta Vasquez, who was in the first (and only) issue I ever owned (bought it off an older kid when I was 8, 1984).

What is Roberta up to nowadays? I would like to see some recent pics of her. BTW, Petra Verkaik was the Playmate in the last issue of the decade of the 80s---December, 1989. After that began the downfall of Playboy with its obsession with implants and Playmates who looked like they all had identical factory stamped artificial looking bodies.

55 posted on 10/29/2002 3:32:08 AM PST by PJ-Comix
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To: Nachum
Now, how do viruses fit into this whole thing?

I guess Norton and Trojan have a merger on the horizon...
56 posted on 10/29/2002 3:40:31 AM PST by ovrtaxt
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To: prisoner6
Re: post 54

Punchcards! HA! You remind me (fondly) of the teachers in the math department during high school. (Computer class was taught by math teachers back then, on TRS 80's. The one hotrodded computer had a little "64K" insignia next to the keyboard--that's the one we used to fight over!)

The techers were computer geeks from the late 60's, most of them great guys to just hang out with and talk about the space program in it's golden age. One teacher taught missile physics and we built Estes rockets as a class project, then had a launch day. What a cool teacher.
57 posted on 10/29/2002 3:49:44 AM PST by ovrtaxt
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To: All
The drool covering this thread is, well... palpable.
58 posted on 10/29/2002 3:56:45 AM PST by HiTech RedNeck
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To: PJ-Comix
It wouldn't be right without a photo so....
59 posted on 10/29/2002 7:12:54 AM PST by texson66
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To: texson66
BUMP (and grind)
60 posted on 10/29/2002 9:28:39 AM PST by dcwusmc
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