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How To Hug a Chicken Via the Internet
the_newsbeagle writes "Adrian Cheok, a professor of electrical engineering in Japan, wants to invent a "multisensory Internet" that will transmit not just information, but also experiences. To usher in this new age, he started by building a haptic system that enabled him to send a hug to a chicken via the Internet. Next came the 'huggy pajama' project, which allowed distant parents to send their kid a goodnight squeeze. Lately he's begun working on sending a taste over the internet with his 'digital lollypop' project."
Really? Hug a Chicken? Come on it's called Choking your chicken, the Internet is a weird place.
True remote physical examinations, with the patient and physician both feeling and responding to the tactile interaction. This could be huge - especially in terms of extreme remote medicine, such as handling astronaut-patients on lengthy missions to Mars or the asteroid belt.
I'm just waiting for such a technology as that lollipop to actually take off, so I can read about hackers replacing the digital data for the flavor information with that harvested from a turd.
That's some prankstering hacking I would roffle reading.
Growing up in Adelaide, Australia, Cheok had often played with the chickens kept by his grandfather, so he decided to focus on poultry (rule one). He built haptic jackets for the chickens himself (rule two), embedding them with vibrating elements. Tinkering taught him just how difficult it is to produce a gentle, humanlike touch. “The system develops as you build it,” Cheok says. “I see research as iterative—you’re learning from what you’re making.”