Reaching Through the Net to Touch

Researchers at the University at Buffalo, New York, announced last week they have developed a system that lets one person experience the sense of touch felt by another. They said they could transmit the sensation across the Internet.

By Daithí Ó hAnluain Wired.com

In about five years, people may use the system to feel the force and pressure Tiger Woods experiences every time he wallops a golf ball. It could be used in e-commerce, enabling buyers to feel fabrics before they buy. Or students could feel the precise pressure applied by brain surgeons as they remove tumors. They could potentially palpate the tumor, or any other organ, for themselves.

What’s more, the sensory data can be saved, allowing one sensation to be accessed indefinitely. So in 30 years’ time, golfers could still train with Tiger Woods in his prime.

The technology has obvious applications in distance learning, remote diagnostics, virtual reality and entertainment.

"As far as we know, our technology is the only way a person can communicate to another person the sense of touch he feels when he does something," said Thenkurussi Kesavadas, director of UB’s Virtual Reality Lab. "We have added an important dimension to communication of touch sensations."

Kesavadas, who is also an associate professor at the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and his team have successfully transmitted the sensation of touching a soft or hard object. They also have transmitted the ability to feel the contour of particular shapes from one person to another over the Internet.

His work belongs to the growing domain of haptic, or sense-of-touch, technologies. "It is an emerging technology in terms of consumers," said Ian Oakley, research associate at Media Lab Europe.

Consumers are familiar with low-end haptic applications like joysticks and game controllers that jolt and vibrate in time with on-screen action.

The team used a commercial haptic device called Phantom. It works by using a robot arm to trace, in three-dimensional space, the shape and general texture of a computer model, say a 3-D image of Homer Simpson. The device enables a user to sense the contour and stiffness or elasticity of an object.

In Kesavadas’ experiment, one subject would feel an object with a data glove, created at UB. Data was then sent to the Phantom device, and another user could then attempt to trace the object and experience what the sender was feeling.

Ultimately, however, the team envisages gloves providing the sensory feedback.

"Five years ago most people started haptics research by building their own output device from the ground up," said Oakley. He developed a haptic application called ContactIM that lets users send a physical message across the Internet using a game joystick. Now experts from diverse fields have entered the fray at the new research frontier.

The EuroHaptics conference to be held July 6-9 is a case in point. The submitted work ranges from psychology to mechanical engineering and mathematical modeling, and includes more esoteric pieces considering computer haptics in expressive disciplines such as painting and sculpting.

Touch is not the only sense available across the Internet. Smell, too, can be transmitted, with a device that uses a potpourri of chemicals to produce a variety of odors. One can imagine that taste might be transmitted too, given that the human sense of taste comes down to five types of receptors that record bitter, sweet, sour, salty and "umami," a Japanese word meaning deliciousness.

But touch is one of the most important sensations for growth and learning. While babies without hearing or sight grow and thrive, babies born with a rare condition that disables their sense of touch rarely survive. Touch can sense surface irregularities that are invisible to the eye, and it is a vital sense in early learning, providing input long before a baby can interpret sight and sound. But transmitting the experience of touch felt by another person is one process that has, thus far, remained elusive.

"I think we’re on the cusp of having viable haptic interactions over long distances through sensing and force-feedback devices," said Roberta Klatzky, professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, and a keynote speaker at EuroHaptics.

Kesavadas believes his team has hit on that innovation. Their take is to transmit not the sensation of someone touching another person, which, conceptually, is what Oakley has done, but to transmit what a distant correspondent is feeling as he or she interacts with the world.

"The big breakthrough for us was to figure out that the users needed to actively track and try to repeat what the other person is trying to do, and that was when the receiver started reliving what the sender was trying to do. It was a big step for us," said Kesavadas.

The proof came during a blind test where, in 80 percent of the cases, receivers could accurately gauge whether the sender was feeling a sphere or rectangular object. In another test, they had to determine whether the sender was feeling a hard or soft object, with a similar success rate.

Work toward a practical application is well advanced. Dr. James Mayrose, research assistant professor with the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University at Buffalo’s school of medicine, performed a proof of concept by modeling the abdomen in two healthy males.

"We’ve been running a telemedicine program here, and the biggest problem we find is that physicians here can’t palpate the patient. It’s the major problem for accurate diagnoses in telemedicine we’ve encountered. So I started looking into how we might do that."

With the Mayrose model in place, the issue now is to transmit that data to an output device that accurately mimics the sensation felt by the on-site physician. This is what Kesavadas believes he has achieved.

Meanwhile, the haptics world awaits the results of Kesavadas’ research with interest.

"I’d certainly welcome any technology that could do this, and I look forward to seeing results that prove it’s a viable technology," said Klatzky.

"The researchers at Buffalo seem to be moving beyond this by using sensors to measure aspects of the real world," said Oakley at Media Lab Europe. "This is novel and interesting, and probably has applicability for training, especially in safety-critical domains such as surgery. However, although it is a substantial conceptual step, it is not a massive technological leap compared to previous research."

The UB researchers plan to publish their research in MIT’s virtual-reality journal, Presence, and they have also spun off a company, Tactus Technologies, to promote their technology. Kesavadas believes the market for devices like his could be $1 billion in five years.

One day, you may be able to hold a wad like that in your hand, virtually.

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