NTT's Cool - Human Area Networking Technology

kvsnut writes "I4U is reporting about NTT's research project called RedTacton - It 'safely turns the surface of the human body into a data transmission path at speeds up to 10 Mbps between any two points on the body.' There is a pretty interesting site (uses flash) setup to showcase the technology. If you want to jump to a non-flash overview, try here. It be cool if I could sync my Treo (I'm saving for) by just touching a cradle (or heck the PC)."

Comments

Re:More trouble than it's worth?

[LnxAddct]

If I have a phone with a contact you want on it, I'll just let you hold my phone while you hold yours and then you give it right back. It'd take less then a second for us to sync contacts without plugging in a single thing. This could be done while walking down the street, and another aspect of it is that its more secure then using blue tooth or other wireless transmission that tends to not be encrypted. The potential for this is pretty amazing. Another one I can think of off the top of my head is if you wear something like a watch or chain that sends a constantly shifting key through your body (similar to the rsa little devices), then simply by touching something you could verify you were the holder of a credit card or other miscellaneous forms of authorization. It'd be like a digital fingerprint. If your groceries are tagged with rfid, have a scanner find the cost of everything in your cart, then you simply touch a little piece of metal or something to pay for it. The whole process could take less then a second. Another possible use is to place sensors on steering wheels... This could reshape how we interact with the world. Now if only they can find a way for the body to retain that information for short (or long) periods of time. We'd be walking harddrives, so much for a 40 gb ipod...just touch the headphones to your skin somewhere.
Regards,
Steve

Mobile Phone data transfer

[davejenkins]

The real drive behind this is the usage for mobile phones. Here in Japan, mobile phones have become the dominant data handling device. Phones here have the full rolodex, appointment calendar, mp3 player, as well as Final Fantasy/Tetris/CowboyNeal game-of-choice. There are adapters coming online now that will let people browse MSWord and Excel files via their mobile.

But the drive here is a great social need: when groups go out to dinner, friends, co-workers, business partners, etc. there is always this 10-minute ritual where everyone has to call everyone else in the group, in order to capture their phone number and contact information. If NTT can issue phones where everyone trades this information by touching hands, then they have an edge over the others.

Japanese protect their privacy vehemently, but are also information hoarders much greater than their US or EU equivalents. Phone rolodexes are huge-- people have every contact they met in the last 4 years (which is in the thousands if you work in Tokyo).