New Technology: Touched By The Net

Imagine you are chatting with your loved one who is sitting thousands of miles away and you get this sudden urge to touch him/her.

Impossible, you say?

Well, if engineers in the United States are to be believed, this will one day be in the realm of possibility!

Dr Thenkurussi Kesavadas, Associate Professor and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Director, Virtual Reality Lab at University at Buffalo, has developed a technology that can transmit the sensation of touch over the internet.

The technology
Explaining the technology to XPRESS, Dr Kesavadas said, "Haptic technology is an emerging field of research with tremendous potential in training, education, medicine, etc. Our technology, attempts to capture haptic attributes of a skilled person in any field which requires some motor skill and then storing these skill-sets, to be experienced by a novice learner or observer later. We call this ‘sympathetic haptics'.

"We are all familiar with low-end haptic applications like joysticks and controllers that vibrate with on-screen action. This technology takes it further."

The breakthrough could lead to the creation of haptic technologies that convey the sense of touch and teach users how to master skills and activities -such as surgery, sculpture, playing drums or even golf - that require precise application of ‘touch' and movement, according to Dr Kesavadas.

Dr Kesavadas says his innovation allows doctors to be able to feel and check a patient's organs for injury or disease via the internet. Using data gloves, physicians could examine the organs of patients sitting continents apart. "This technology could also bring experienced hands to large rural areas across the world," he added.

So what could be the applications of this exciting technology?

"We are exploring a few applications. By capturing a skilled calligrapher's way of writing, we are trying to train people who might have lost writing abilities. For surgical training, we capture the way a surgeon would wield a scalpel," said Dr Kesavadas.

How It works:

The system uses a virtual-reality data glove to capture the hardness or softness of an object felt by a person. A sensing device transmits this feeling to another PC user, who tracks a point on the computer screen that is linked both by hardware and software between two personal computers via the internet. So touch data, converted into sophisticated mathematical algorithms, can be transmitted from one person feeling an object to a person at another computer.