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Handshake via the Internet
mattlamb writes "British and American scientists will touch using sensors over the internet. "The implications of the experiment could be vast, said UCL, which describes the event as the world's "first transatlantic handshake over the Internet." " Let the juvenile comedy
commence!
Somehow the idea of sex with 50ms latency doesn't sound so appealing...
...hardware handshaking!
wouldn't this be a step backwards? It is ignoring the vast mental conveyance abilities of the internet to revert to the warn physical ideas that most people are so impressionable about. I think that this might reignate the prior discussions that we've had regarding psychological attachment disorders. People should learn to communicate via things like email or ICQ.
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1. develop internet touch sensors
2. start porn site
3. ?XXX?
4. Profit!!!
"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."
One would hope this could be discussed without immediately putting your mind in the gutter, but with quotes like this, it's impossible. It's obvious what these scientists are really trying to develop.
...
that one of them is a practical joker.
American Scientist "And that concludes this historic First Ever Trans-Atlantic Handshake."
Brit scientist (to his buddies) "He he, he thinks the glove is on my hand!"
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Now I can NOT get any action from women all over the world!
"Shake, partner!"
[stretches out hand]
"Psyche!"
[deftly runs hand through hair]
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
So will 'ping' now be replaced by 'poke'? Gives a new meaning to the term 'finger' on IRC and other communication systems
Insert Sig Here
Can't wait for the followup story: "Script kiddies hack robot hands -- scientists recovering in hospital after repeated punches to the face"
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
There's a lot more info in this press release from MIT.
Using this for telemedicine sounds particularly interesting...
Pull my finger!
Blunder of the Ages
By Reporter AC
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In what amounts to a new twist on an old and venerable tradition, Senator Trent Lott (R) accidentally kissed a hand and shook a baby during a fundraiser in his home state of Mississippi today. The technical glitch was quickly discovered to be caused by an aide plugging the new TouchMeFeelMe internet tactile simulator backwards, but the parent of the jostled child was even less pleased than the baby according to witnesses. More...
My
Limekiller
Sampling x number of sensors with y bits of precision 1000 times a second? Um yeah, that's pretty damned high bandwith.
... for just the sensor info of the handshake. If it is more like 1000 per square inch, then we talking even more.
:)
Figure you need a fairly high value of x to determine things like woody / fleshy material, lets say 100 per square inch. (I have no idea if 100 is really reasonable, it may be more like 1000.)
Then you also need some decent resolution of those sensors, say 8 bits worth.
Then we get 100 * 1000 * 8 = 800000 b/s or around 800 kb/s (would that be 781?)
Now, my hand has more than 1 square inch of surface area, so scale appropriatly.
Subtract compression, add TCP overhead, and that's still several megabit at a minimum
And I always thought you only needed 3 TCP packets to make a handshake
The device they are using seems to be the Phantom by SensAble Tecnologies (product page). I used one of these a few weeks ago at USC's Integrated Media Systems Cetner, they're pretty cool. If you are interested in this kind of thing, the field is called "haptics," from the greek "to touch."
Craig Charles (Dave Lister on Red Dwarf for those not in the know) at a sci-fi convention mentioned this technology or something similar to it. But he had issues with it. His bigest concern with having sex like this over the internet was thus.
What happens if you get a power surge? Rips your dick off and faxes it to Canada?
I know that would concern me
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Can't wait for the research to go commercial? Try the FuckU-FuckMe, the ultimate remote sex solution! :-)
The article glosses over the fact that there are very, very few genuinely practical applications for this because of two insurmountable problems.
For one, our experiments at the time demonstrated that the hand-control idiom suffers from any lag; specifically that delicate manual operations are basically imposible with latency as low as 30ms which rule out things like surgery done this way. Hand dexterity depends on a very large number of relexive immediate movement in response to subtle stimuli like minute vibration of the tool, perceieved resistance, etc.
The second problem is one that operators of such devices very quickly become disoriented, often nauseated, because of the discordance between years of ingrained knowledge of how the world reacts to touch and the lagged/different input such tools provide.
People need to learn /new/ idioms for remote manipulation, not attempt to emulate biological systems. That's the same peoblem AI research has suffered from its inception: the day computers will display intelligence is when researchers start working on computer intelligence instead of trying to simulate human intelligence.
Same goes with tools.
While this might be a geekly thing to do (handshake over the net) and quite a bit neat, it's neither revolutionnary nor interresting in the long run.
-- MG
Not to mention "remote hole."
Ok, now it's getting yucky. I'll quit.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
In the words of Dennis Miller:
"when the day comes that a unmployed steel worker can strap himself into his Barco-Lounger and fuck Claudia Shiffer for 19.95 an hour, it's going to make crack look like sanka"
Americans could not be more self absorbed if they were made of equal parts water and paper towel. -Dennis Miller
So it's like a really sophisticated version of a Nintendo Game Glove. Or a MS Sidewinder Controller with Force Feedback.
Sorry, I don't see whats so awe inspiring about sending data through a network.
Maybe it's just me.
Ann: "Hey, this new remote hand technology is great for our tech-support desks."
Bob: "Do you mean like showing callers how to reboot and find the Esc key?"
Ann: "No, for slapping sense into clueless idiots."
Table-ized A.I.
...Why is it that "scientists have done x over the Internet" is automatically newsworthy? The same demonstration performed over a cable between two adjacent rooms would not have been significantly easier. Stuffing arbitrary data into TCP packets is just not that hard.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
When I went to college, there was a girl named Teresa Watt who had an account on the RS/6000. My buddy Rob had tears in his eyes when he showed me that you can actually "finger twatt".
Thank you AC... where ever you are.