SAN JOSE, Calif. — The world got a little smaller Tuesday after scientists reached around the globe via the Internet and touched.
Or rather, the scientists — in London, Boston, and Los Angeles — picked up a virtual cube on a computer screen at the same time and pushed it around. The scientists, holding robotic arms, could feel the force being exerted by the others as well as the texture of the cube.
Though computers have been able to transmit such sensations in close quarters for several years, the distance between the scientists was a new milestone that they hope will eventually lead to new collaborative applications in telemedicine, education and art.
“I think the most important applications are the ones we don’t know yet,” said Mandayam Srinivasan, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Touch Lab and leader of the MIT team that developed the technology. “When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he didn’t see all the possibilities.”
The breakthrough actually occurred in May and was detailed in a paper presented Oct. 9 in Portugal at the conference called PRESENCE 2002: The 5th Annual International Workshop on Presence. Tuesday marked the first public demonstration.
By adding a sense of touch, researchers hope to improve the experience of various virtual environments, which are usually limited to sight and sound. The field of research involving touch is referred to as “haptics.”
The robotic arm and the software have been commercially available for several years. But the teams altered the software so the program could be used across the Internet. Despite the breakthrough, researchers said they were well aware of the limitations.
The arms have to be moved very slowly because the transmission of signals across the Internet can often be slow and jumpy. Srinivasan said researchers will be focused on improving the network performance, the processing speed of the computers, and the software to fine tune their work.
“As the software becomes more sophisticated and computers become faster, we can have widespread virtual environments where we interact more naturally,” Srinivasan said.