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ElectAura-Net, a 10-Mbit/second Body Network
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'Human Body Network Gets Fast,' Technology Research News tells us that NTT Docomo researchers in Japan have created a 10-Mbit/second indoor network by using human bodies as Ethernet cables. 'The network, dubbed ElectAura-Net, is wireless, but instead of using radio waves, infrared light, or microwaves to transmit information it uses a combination of the electric field that emanates from humans and a similar field emanating from special floor tiles.' ElectAura-Net is faster than the Bluetooth radio wave system and provides a solution for indoor networks. The researchers think that this is a solution for "ubiquitous" communication, using GPS outdoor and our bodies indoor. This summary contains more details."
So, I start an important download, leave to get lunch, and come back to find that nothing has happened because MY BODY is a necessary component of the network?
No matter how many times I look at the calendar, it's not April 1st.
..but how much does this cost? If you have to put special flooring down and cover the entire area of a room, the cost of the system and the floor material is going to be high. The first use will probably appear in convention centers/meeting rooms so everyone can link their laptops and palm pilots at 10Mb/s.
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
Hey, these are the precursor to Star Trek Comm-Badges.
"Computer, where is CowboyNeil?"... "CowboyNeil is in the john."
... "CancerNet". :)
i think i'll stick with 802.11g
A) You have WAY too much time on your hands...
B) She looks too young to be legal in most states.
C) What are you, her publicist?
Man, this just sounds so much like people wanting a matrix scenario !
It's wild.
I like it.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
10 Mbit/s via more or less electrostatic fields? Excuse me. Maybe one can use humans as antennae, but imho (as a physicist) the resulting radiation has nothing to do with natural body electric fields.
great now geeks around the world are forced to choose between good bandwidth and having to "interface" with real people.....
Twenty-first century organizations have to compete on brands because they have nothing left
That could be an extremely useful technology. In a crowded space you could solve many of the range problems that less powerful wireless technologies like bluetooth have, obstacles(as long as they were humans) would actually improve the range. I wonder if there are any effects to the human ethernet cables though.
read my blog
musings on politics and technol
No /. effect detected yet.
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
I don't want to have to install special flooring for a "wireless" solution. Laying cable is easier and and I can take it with me if I move. Floor tiles? C'mon, it needs to be easy to set up, not require construction work.
in my opinion the biggest effect this technological breakthrough will have is on pick-up lines. "hey baby, can i plug into your NIC?" don't click here
Stuff like this, working or not, will first have to overcome those who will scream bloody murder thinking it might give them cancer.
"What? Using my body as an ethernet cable?! I can probably practically feel the testicular cancer already!"
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stop responding to off-topic trolls.
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
Down In Front!
You're cuasing me to drop packets!
COME ON! Where the frell is Haxalot, it's gonna get /.'d any minute!!!!!
Omgooses sorry I took so long, there is no Google Cache, however, here's the artical text:
Human Body Network Gets Fast Technology Research News October 17, 2003
The human body is capable of many things, including acting as an information conduit--quite literally.
Researchers from NTT Docomo Multimedia Labs and NTT Microsystem Integration Labs in Japan have demonstrated a 10-megabits-per-second indoor network that uses human bodies as portable ethernet cables.
The network, dubbed ElectAura-Net, is wireless, but instead of using radio waves, infrared light, or microwaves to transmit information it uses a combination of the electric field that emanates from humans and a similar field emanating from special floor tiles.
The network is faster than commercially available personal area networks like the 1-megabit-per-second Bluetooth radio wave system, and tops the 4-megabits-per-second infrared standard set by the Infrared Data Association (IrDA).
The system could eventually provide high-speed wireless communications indoors among portable electronic devices whose positions constantly change.
The researchers' transceiver transmits data by oscillating the electric field surrounding the device. When the electric field that naturally emanates from a person intersects the electric field of the nearest tile transceiver, oscillations in one field are transmitted to the other.
The researchers presented the work at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group Graphics (Siggraph) 2003 conference in San Diego, July 27 to 31. The research was funded by NTT DoCoMo and NTT.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
My strict dad walks into the networked room where I am standing, embracing to get a decent connection
"LET GO of her immediatly!
But dad, I was just fingering her, and she was having a look at my root.. please, I was going to show her how to fsck!
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
see this for examples.
I'm dying to know how a kirlian image appears differently if the 'human network' is carring porn, or a virus.. or spam.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I got it, and logged in too...Feel the karma burn. Still, work's been quiet today, so I feel like I've accomplished something now. Thanks all.
YUO ROXOR.
o we rcweaserlowercweaserowercweaserlowercweaserlowercw easerlowercweaserlowercweasersercase
lowercweallowercweaserlowercweaserlowercweaserl
the network fell down...
Oh well, what the hell...
brings a whole new meaning to handshake..
http://www.virtualconcepts.nl/
Connect a linear amplifier to the device and you get a very nice Personal Space Heater too.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Reminds me in a way of the club scene in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age...
stop responding to responses to off-topic trolls
Look ma, I'm glowing!
Great. So if my site gets Slashdotted does my pacemaker time out in sympathy?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Can you just imagine the questions that IT people would get with this kind of thing, or the havoc that I'm sure they're going to wreak.
Norm: "Can I get a virus off the network?"
IT Guy: "Ummm... Sure, you have to wear these tinfoil shoes to keep the viruses from entering your body."
Norm: "Can the boss read my thoughts with it?"
IT Guy: "Just wear this tinfoil hat, it'll keep out their mind control rays too."
As you can see the possibilities are endless.
"Whenever I come closer to my server to troubleshoot it going offline, everything works just fine but if I leave it unattended for 15 minutes it loses connection. And if I come back it gets it back..."
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Although it's probably not that likely, it's still possible that manipulating the bodys electric field could cause health problems. Anyone know if it could say, cause nerves to misfire or behave strangely? (Oscillating the electric field would theoretically create an electric charge in any nearby conductors (nerves), right?)
Ten injured at ferry accident in Amsterdam.
I'm envisioning a PDA-like device that grabs the info of anyone you touch... With contact you don't actually need the floor tiles, is this correct?
"She gave me an STD, AND a computer virus!"
No text man
Well just have to wondered what someone giving you a static shock would do
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Thats the death knell for this tech. No one is going to install "special floor tiles" for an application that may or may not have any practical use.
Next idea please.
Obviously, NTT has failed to take one major problem into consideration, which will doom this concept to complete failure...
;-)
Geeks do not touch one another. Encouraging them to do so for the sake of increased bandwidth will simply confuse them, and probably cause more than a few nervous breakdowns (of course, that assumes that having your bioelectric field modulated at 10MHz won't do that anyway).
Sigh. Yet another good idea sent to the scrap heap for not understanding its target audience.
How can they pass this off as new tech?
I remember setting up similar networks almost 20 years ago!
"Stand in a circle, children. Now hold the hand of the person next to you... and when you feel someone squeeze your right hand, you squeeze your left hand as quick as you can to pass on the message."
We could get the pulse zipping around the circle surprisingly fast. You know, probably, uh, almost 10 mega-sqeezes a second.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Oh the pain of packetstorms and packet collisions across my forehead!
do() || do_not();
"Oh my god! The network is down!"
"Oh, it's OK, Bob just had to take a leak. We he lies back down on the floor, it'll be OK!"
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
This brings a whole new meaning to the term Packet Sniffer. Hmm... I smell data in the air.
I don't mean to sound pollyanna-ish, but that sounds like the future! ... Or maybe I've read too much Sci-fi.
Which is why I see it causing cancer in 50 years.
Carpe Diem!
This isn't a redundant post; I just set my threshold to 6.
In other news, the Germans have developed a microwave oven that seats 40.
stop responding to responses to responses to...oh nevermind!
Using our bodies odour?
Ah, outdoor... *whew*... can breathe now...
I know geeks don't dance but I forsee this being used in nightclubs on dancefloors. I remember someone a while back trying to give people wristbands that would track vitals and transfer them to a computer to control the music at a niteclub. Something like this floor could be used as a voting system to automatically determine whether the crowd at a club or party likes the music or not based on the number of "connections" on the dancefloor. It could also rate the music or any other live entertainment for that matter based on whether the people were moving or standing around. So if you have a pretty decent beat, the people move. If it sucks, the people will stop dancing or even get off the dancefloor for a water break. I think it is pretty cool.
an outdoor method of communication?
"humans produce 12,000 btu's of body heat, we have managed to put that in good and efficient use, they also make great radio transmitters too!"
This must have some sexual use, i just cant put my finger on it ;)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
In other news, the product 'Soylent CAT-3' was introduced today.
Enter Serial Experiments Lain!
Japanese watch too much Anime!
Of course, so do I!
GPL Deconstructed
"I just got a job back at my old company. I'll be doing computer networking. I'm going to be part of a team implementing an Ethernet connection to the Indian firm that the company gave my old job to. I understand that there will be a lot of handholding necessary. I just don't understand why they are giving me a rubber raft..."
We need to learn how to judge these systems. It takes years to develop and deploy a technology like this, and after you do, it would be very nice if it could be stretched for years to come. 10 MBaud might sound nice now, especially if its a real 10 MB unlike WiFi, but will it meet the need 5 years from now? At least some of the energies of the industry need to be focusing on how to get residential baud rates back onto a long term Moore's law-like development curve without killing us with new home or community infrastructure rollouts every few years.
A good wireless fit into the home network should aim itself to eliminating the mass of cables behind my entertainment center and making it possible to have many high fidelity video bandwidth devices that can be easily moved around without concern about the cost of fishing new cables. To match it to existing hardware, it probably should aim at IEEE 1394 per device speeds. If a small module were available to convert IEEE 1394 ports or USB 2 ports to the new backbone, many devices would be hostable on the home's network today. In order to host a large number of devices, preferably multiple security cameras, multiple LCDs or projectors, multiple speaker systems, etc, I suspect that this means that it should be a cellular network with a fiber backbone and cells that are room sized. It might actually be beneficial if the signal could not easily penetrate walls. The fiber backbone should use a type and quantity of fiber that we know can satisfy needs for about 20 years (approximately 11 Moore's generations) so that we can just upgrade the cells without fishing the walls again. The cell stations should be easily swappable, overpowered (for growth) modules. They should be placed so that if a future generation decided to use a spread spectrum light solution along with the RF for backwards compatibility, their placement would support it. The modules should be designed with the expectation of a 3 year lifetime before the owner would want to upgrade at least some of the rooms. Hopefully, with the range limited to rooms, the size and amount of power of the mobile side could be kept down.
Why would we need this kind of switched bandwidth? The only answer a geek should need is, if you build the infrastructure, the need will come. My personal desire would be to gradually turn my home into a lab that is ubiquitously connected so that I can start experimenting with using electronics as a means to bridge gaps, not just between man and computer, but between people and also to start using electronics to ease more of the mundane tasks of life and increase quality of life rather than for pure entertainment.
One aspect in particular that could have prevented the last several deaths/major disabilities in my family would be continuous medical monitoring and analysis. Detecting heart attacks and strokes at an early stage through continuous monitoring so that the benefits of existing treatments that must be administered in a timely fashion can be fully realized could save or preserve the quality of over a million lives a year in the US alone.
Yes, systems like that exist, but deployment is too selective and too expensive. If we build out the infrastructure and sensor networks as a multiuse system, the only part that has to come from the medical industry would be the software. And I suspect they couldn't keep the open source community out of that as long as it is served from countries that don't regulate equipment and software intended for medical use.
Heh maybe some kind of a mood ring or something that changes hue according to network traffic.
What about the poor saps who have to sit in the server room all day long?
Poor guys.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
"Jesus, Bob! Are you just going to sit around all day drinking coffee?"
"Back off, man! I'm busting my ass transferring a 2.5GB file over here!"
Another thought: would hiring fat people give you more bandwidth?
Since when is GPS a communication method?
O, so this is why all those xion's in the matrix have to be partying and becoming unsuaully buff when all they do all day is spend time in simulators virtually fighting the matrix with their minds, ranged weapons and ships opposed to knives and hammers which actually demand strength... I always wondered if they were excersicing for hand to mechanical tentacle combat or something...
Last year in my second year of civil engineering, we got to do a project. Me and 3 people worked on exactly such a 'dance-o-meter'.
;).
We had a couple of weird ideas about a local-positioning-system (mini gps), wristbands with transmitters, or transmitting data by contact with the floor, etc.
Basically an LPS would be way out of our scope, a wristband would give problems as well: it needs power and electronics, but has to be light and portable.
We settled for turning the dancefloor into a giant, fast responding balance with pressure sensors. Those were in fact nothing more than strainstrips (not sure if this is the correct word, a resistor that changes when force is applied along its length) on the support points of the floor. It was very solid and sturdy (didn't feel like dancing on jello), but still gave out a very clean signal to the computer. By comparing this data with the music being played (some FFT magic going on here with beat detection) we finally got out a magic number saying how much people were dancing in tune.
In our case, we coupled it with an MP3 database sorted into genres, and adapting the popularity of each genre as it is being played.
Because this was a second year project, we had to settle for 1 m of floor (so max 2-3 people dancing) but our results were pretty good. Basically even when you're dancing with your arms only, you're shifting weight from one foot to the other, and this is easily detected.
You don't need fancy body-networks for this
"It seems like we're going to need to reset the network. Get everyone in the office to join hands together, and then..."
The future of hacking: by shaking hands with someone you're stealing their credit card, social security number, and a gigabyte of porn they keep stored in their pocket for when the office is slow.
Wait, isn't that how CNN portrays hackers already?
c'mon guys, didn't we just collectively debunk the human aura yesterday calling anyone who can see it a crackpot. and now we're believing stories that it can be used for beloved networking?
lmao.
(slight but not that-important spoilers ahead)
Basically, in this anime series probably set in the near future the Net we know is called the 'Wired', and it is undergoing transition to IPv7 (no typo involved).
IPv7 seemingly uses traditional communication systems, as well as the Earth's background magnetic field to transmit data. And humans are able to parse the data transmitted through the mag field. That means, the Wired is plugged right into the sensorium of the entire human race. Confusion ensues, as reality and the 'net are being mixed up in everybody's minds, leading to... interesting situations.
This news reminds me of this anime, too... And what a coincidence, a well-known japanese telco is involved.
- Hadriven
Well, human bodies do work as antennas, as anyone (old) who has ever grabbed TV rabbit ears knows. So, I suppose this is not beyond the bounds of possibility. It would likely be pretty short range though, especially with the bandwidth claimed. More bandwidth = more energy, and we can't have people getting electric shocks walking around the floor! The above also makes me wonder about the effect of shoe thickness - being that this was in japan, were the users wearing shoes?
By comparing this [floor pressure] data with the music being played (some FFT magic going on here with beat detection) we finally got out a magic number saying how much people were dancing in tune.
Could you use it to display PERFECT!!, GREAT!, GOOD, Boo, or Miss... on the walls?
Will I retire or break 10K?
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
You're breaking up my connection!
"Yes, honey, I in fact DO need to stand right near the hot woman in my ofice and follow her around all day long, otherwise I can't download porn at work all day long. ...uh..."
s'wut i sed.
The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120 volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, eventually we'll be able to grown humans to supply the networks and energy we need.
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
[Read to the thought of a Bugs Bunny cartoon after Daffy swallows the Acme Mega-Battery]
Hey, great Zzzzzt! network. How Zzzzzt! does Zzzzzzt! it work? Zzzzzt!
Does it work with my Tinfoil Hat?!
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
What happens if you /. the server that happens to be a part of this network...does everybody along the route get electrocuted? (Speaking of routes, how is traceroute going to work? Will it resolve people's names for me?)
Network Error: 0x0BADF00D - Intermediate peer has overflowed buffer and disconnected from network.
"Mommy, mommy, can I go play outside?"
"No Jimmy, now go stand there till I finish browsing the Internet"
"Mommy, mommy, who's that man on the bed?"
"He's the SBC-Yahoo-ElectAura repairman, dear."
Sign at an Internet Cafe:
"Browsing : $2/hr
Holding hands : forbidden"
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Next time, use Google properly ;-)
--
J. Javier Maestro
J. Javier Maestro
At what point will marketing take over. At what point will the marketing droids figure out what will make every consumer buy exactly what they want them to. The best way I can see it is, marketing will eventually be able to figure out exactly how to make someone buy a product, and so will the rest of the companies. We will be forced by the marketing to buy a product and be happy with it, even though it serves no purpose and we don't really need it. At what point will this stop. People will be thown into jail due to debt because they went to often to the store to buy things they don't need. It will not be their fault but it will be blamed on them. Or has this day already come? And every product just needs to find it's niche in the way it is marketed. People buy and buy and buy. Whether at the suppermarket or at the local department store. Half the crap I buy I never use but it sounded good that the time. I don't have crap for money yet still I buy. Egads!!!!
CAPS LOCK: ITS LIKE THE CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME
Isn't NTT taking a step backward? I remember getting my first pair of NE2000s so I didn't have to communicate via "sneaker net"
... full story, which is available at Newsstand. (It will also be posted on the TRN website on Wednesday.)
Eric Smalley