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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)."
Damn. I've always wanted to copy and paste between computers. This could be a dream come true for people that have to work on a large number of computers for a short amount of time...
I see immediate applications for this technology -- we need to bring back Hands Across America to create the information superhighway of the 21st century!
- - - - - Fear not the reaper, but my shiny white teeth.
What's the point beyond the coolness factor? Palm devices can already sync via 802.11b or Bluetooth. Wireless technologies can already go faster than 10 mbps, and are cheap and well-tested. If we can transmit data through the air, why do we need to transmit it through our bodies?
Incidentally NTT requests that the press refer to the technology's dermatological side effects as "a healthy tan!" rather than "cooking"
"No honey, you're not fat, you just have lots of bandwidth!"
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
What do you call a Human Area Network that's by itself? HAN SOLO!
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
... we're putting together a local area network!
Think of what we can now do with Electronic porn...
http://domino.research.ibm.com/Comm/bios.nsf/pages /pan.html
From 1997 at IBM
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
-Use 220V power sources only!
-System WILL NOT function properly if flyback transformer output is BELOW 500 KV.
-If bleeding from the ears or urinary tract occurs during use, consult medical assistance immediately.
-DO NOT use in bathtub, shower, or rain.
-Conditions of high humidity should be avoided as electrical arcing may occur between peripheral devices on user.
-People with braces or a pacemaker should refrain from use of this product.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
And should someone at an lcd factory ever get off their ass and make a transparent lcd that fits into a contact lens or better yet, the membrane of your eye you'll be able to use your personal network to communicate with your mobile computer, storage and interface.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
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).
davejenkins.com |
pr0n. After 10,000 years of leading technological innovation, they finally have a way to deliver it directly where it matters....
Could our PDAs swap business cards via a handshake? What will come next? VIRUSES?
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
I have to wonder if these patents will have a chilling effect on their ability to compete in the marketplace.
I think this would be a good thing, since this technique would make it feasible to interface your 'preferences' (stored on a wearable computer) to various electronic or smart gadgets (a smart car/house/etc) so that as soon as you touch it, then the smart gadget is customized to you.
I suppose a simple application, would be if all cars supported this, then as soon as you touched the door latch then: 1) The car door would open, since the car verified who you were. 2) The seat would adjust to your body height 3) The radio would automatically tune itself to your preferences 4) Your playlists would be imported into the radio.
Your preferences can be stored in something relatively small. For example your watch can have this technology and it transmit your preferences to whatever smart gadget you touched.
What would really be neat, is if there were some method of biofeedback so that you could configure your preferences by 'thinking about it'. At that point, we would have something similar to the "Ancient's 'Automated' Technology" as shown on StarGate: Atlantis tv show.
Once, smoking cigarettes was considered 'safe'. Putting radio waves thru the human body is never a great idea.
TechWorld.com has a fairly detailed article on RedTacton, in which it says this about the concern of electric shocks: "The transceivers, which require a PCMCIA card to connect with an electronic device, use several hundred milliwatts of power and are insulated to avoid electric shocks. As with many items of household electrical equipment, like TVs and kettles, the transceivers do emit very weak electromagnetic fields, but the levels are in compliance with guidelines issued by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, NTT said." Interesting Read. I have the link to the article on my blog at: http://sundroid.blogspot.com/.
Sun and Fun
This would probably be great for one's own devices (cell, palm) but using it for auths exposes the toucher to a variety of diseases, especially from public interfaces. People would probably be loathe to use this to pay for something, if they have to touch a contact point that's been touched by everyone before them.
Also, there's the possibility that someone could pick up your auth sig from a handrail or doorknob or something... unless you have to enable the auth for something like the next transaction, or the next x seconds, or key in some kind of id that indicates which touch is authorized. That adds a level of complexity that defeats the whole point of the touch interface.
this isn't a sig. i type this (including the two dashes), every time i post, just to make it look like a sig.
How many people take 5 minutes to swap out one usb cable for another? I mean, what's the breakdown here?
.25 Minutes - Where the **** am I?
.75 Minutes - Oh yeah right, Earth.
.25 Minutes - Pull out USB cable.
.25 Minutes - Plug in digital camera into USB port.
.25 Minutes - Continue plugging and unplugging because the icon didn't appear right away.
.25 Minutes - Phone ringing, give up, buddy needs assistance setting up his new WinXP box. Lucky he has an expert like me around.
1 Minute - Do I really need to unplug my USB flashlight to download my digital camera pix?
1 Minute - Where the **** is my digital camera?
1 Minute - Where the **** is my laptop?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The biggest market I see for this (other than the obvious marketing/spy novel stuff) is user authentication. People like myself fear bioauthentication because, well if someone steals your identity, you are pretty much boned.
With this system, you can have a separate heavily encrypted key for each device you touch, and it can be changed if the need arises.
Death to all passwords!
You could know who entered each and every keystroke!
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
So how long until I can purchase a Human Area Networking Device?
Bring on the sex jokes now...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Didn't Microsoft already patent something similar?
Microsoft Patents The Human Body As A Network Bus
I can already hear the Tech Support calls...
Support: "Hello?"
Customer: "I'm having some trouble with my HAN. It's constantly dropping packets!"
Support: "Well, what are you downloading?"
Customer: "Would you believe me if I said 15GB of Lesbian videos?"
Support: "Please hold."
Seems to me that the obvious entry point is a new wireless optical mouse with this built in. Then you could buy (or it ships with) a memory unit that the user wears. Poof, instant computer usage...secure password storage, configuration data, small files of any kind.
My two questions are:
1) can I do a multidrop connection. There is precious little detail about whether my cell phone, pda, mp3 player, watch, HUD (hey I can dream) all play together seamlessly. If so this will kick so much ass.
2) IIRC the field surrounding the human body is fairly unique to each person...can it be used as part of a biometric system through such a device. This seems kind of unlikely, but would be an interesting low security id system.
But imagine my iPod with headphones using my body as the 'wire'.......
You might be wondering what this technology would have over bluetooth. Well have you ever used bluetooth? You inevitably have to fiddle with it for minutes to find the menu option that lists the devices that you have already registered with and then fiddle more to map the name that is on the menu with the device
Sounds like you are just complaining about some flaws in the implementation of bluetooth rather than actually suggesting an advantage of the HAN approach. How does HAN really solve these problems? You still have to deal with the problem of disambiguation. You still have to have some kind of authorization mechanism so that every device you touch doesn't have instant access to every other device you touch. (Can you imagine a computer virus that literally spreads by touch?)
There are ways that the UI for bluetooth can be improved - to an extent. Security is always inconvenient. That's how Microsoft can stay ahead. Just ignore security and make your UIs better.
-a
about my fat pipe?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Yes, when you put on your tinfoil hat, it will spark a little. This is normal operation.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Someone else mentioned the Microsoft patent.
The interesting thing about Microsft's patent is that it includes power, not just data.
Larry
with a simple disposable firewall none of her information will be able to access your network and vice versa. These firewalls are already available at just about every place imaginable and come in packages of one, three and twelve. Larger packages can be found as well.
Was I the only one who misread that as:
There is a pretty interesting site (uses flesh)
Wow, this gives the Man In The Middle attack a whole new meaning!
... to have cyber sex.
Hey baby, howabout you get a few of your friends and we go make ourselves a beowulf cluster in my room.
Better get some viagra. It looks like your network is down.
I'm hot swappable!
I can see the transcript from divorce court now;
According to your server logs, at 1:15-1:48 AM you were connected and then not connected and then connected and then not connected and then connected and then not connected and then connected and then not connected and then connected and then not connected and then connected and then not connected and then connected... 245 times... Playing patty cake, were we?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Can you imagine a computer virus that literally spreads by touch?
ImagineSuudsu, that stuff is G-E-W-D.
One fairly serious human limitation is the speed of nerve signals. There's about a 100 ms lag between the brain and the hand, longer for the feet.
Not that that's not adequate for everyday life, but if the nerves could somehow be rewired to use this channel instead, reaction times could be seriously lowered with very interesting consequences in several different fields, such as sport, combat, driving or any other physical activity where speed matters.
I realize this will not happen tomorrow, but OTOH I can't think of any fundamental reason that it's impossible.
Not for its given bandwidth at its given range, however.
Contact across the skin implies a range of ~1 meter; at that range the required emitted power for a clear wifi signal is on the order of microwatts.
I'm just waiting till I can buy my new HAN watch with all my environmental preferences and ssh key hash. I'm imagining sitting at any computer and as soon as my hands touch the keyboard, it configures it the way I like it. Heck, at 10mbps, given sufficiently small storage, My hands could touch the keyboard and it could connect to the PC on my wrist for all the data and programs I take with me all the time. PC terminals will replace desktop PCs and even laptops. The PC becomes truely personal, something you don't even notice you're wearing until you need it. Daddy likes.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Is that a datapipe in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?
Sorry, I can remember reading about a patent filed years ago that did this exact thing. One of the ideas behind it was that if you had a PDA type device, you could exchange phone numbers/buisness cards etc. just by shaking hands. I am not sure of my exact source, but a quick google search turned up this published Oct. 1996.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
No, some of them are not peer-reviewed, they're inconclusive but they're still food for thought.
- Radiation20jun02.htm
e en_mobile_phones/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4113989.stm
http://www.mindfully.org/Health/2002/Mobile-Phone
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/08/link_betw
http://www.microwavenews.com/clearerpicture.html
http://www.emrnetwork.org/schools/macopinion.htm
It's the year of Linux! To celebrate I have x free hotmail accounts to give away
Hmm, next time you're near an oscilloscope, try touching your finger to the input. Inspect the signal. Should be about 2 volts of 60 cycle hum, with maybe 10% ragged noise superimposed. Raise your other hand toward the ceiling lights-- the voltage should go up to maybe five volts of raggedy hash. Now touch something grounded-- the voltage should go down to maybe a tenth of a volt, now mostly high-frequency hash. It's unlikely your body is going to make a good data path. Ungrounded, it's a walking antenna for all kind of noise. Grounded, it's a pretty good short to ground. These folks are trying to make filet-mignon out of road-kill-- not very likely to succeed.
... but if you read through the site, alot of the "suggested applications" seem to assume that the little "mobile device" you have on you stores an awful lot of personal information. Sitting down on a plane and it knows whether or not you're in the right seat? Reaching for medecine and an alarm going off because you grabbed the wrong one?
It better be damned well encrypted, because I don't want to sit down on a park bench and suddenly the guy beside me knows exactly who I am and has access boatload of my personal information.
Now, this is less of an issue if, say, my medicine bottles know that "Antyrael" not supposed to be using them, and my "portable device" just says "Hi, I'm Antyrael, what's up?", but that really doesn't sound feasable.
So, I guess what I'm (long-windedly) saying here, is yes; these devices could certainly, shall we say, usher in a new "era" of secure authentication, since only your personal device activates your stuff. But, done wrong (and there are many ways this could be done horribly wrong), this could also spawn greater security risks than ever before.
And what if someone STEALS your personal unit? Suddenly they can authorize themselves as you just by touching a doorknob/mouse/whatever? I shudder at the thought.
</paranoia>Expectations are for the unprepared.