Just about six years ago, I predicted that “remote haptics” was the next big thing. This was perhaps premature, but I stand by my basic point: teledildonics is—dare I say it—coming soon.
Recently I noted progress in haptic skin that can simulate touch. This is the “output device” if you wish, that lets a computer touch the user (“partner?”).
To complete the picture, researchers from Paris report on a biomimetic artificial skin that is designed to be an “input device” [1]. This is a multilayer sensor skin that senses touch a lot like human skin does.
Their demo is strange and icky: they wrap a mobile phone in skin, so you can communicate via touch. They also demonstrate touch pads and wrist bands. The latter suggests the potential for wearable interfaces. These are rather icky because they look (and maybe feel) so much like skin, that it is like something out of a horror film. Vat grown mutant “hone people” or something.
I’ll note that the prototype looks like “flesh”, and tellingly, it is ‘flesh colored’—the band-aid pink of European skin. To be fair, the researchers discuss the range of colors possible, including interesting colors not natural to any human skin. But I assume that they chose colors that appeal to themselves.
In their research article, the researchers discuss the possible uses, but stay in technical mode. They suggest that the enhanced touch interface might be efficient, enhancing work and user productivity. They briefly touch on “applications for emotional communication”, including the “embodiment” of virtual agents.
They demonstrate “mobile tactile expression”, by which they mean “a messaging application where users can express rich tactile emoticons on the artificial skin.” ([1], p. 316) Essentially, you can tickle your phone to write an emoji.
This is obviously not even close to the real goal. The paper indicates that future work must include “output” capabilities, which, as I have noted, have been demonstrated down the road at Lausanne.
Putting this all together, we see now that we can build remote haptic interfaces. Wearing a full body suit (or however much of the body you want to play with), the computer can generate touches. Given a robot or doll or whatever form factor you like, you can touch the skin of the computer.
The obvious application is a virtual world in which each person has an avatar which receives and sends touches from these interfaces. These can be delivered via a network, along with whatever audio and video might make sense. And we have achieve the Icky-arity: actual Internet caresses.
(It will be interesting to find out how lag, jitter, dropped packets, and so on “feel” when you are using such a channel.)
Of course, this communication is digitally mediated, so any number of algorithms might—dare I say it—manipulate the data. Autotune to “optimize” kissing? Magnified personal capabilities? Replays of greatest hits? Libraries of celebrity partners?
Finally, I’ll note the interesting opportunities for hacking or malicious use. Who is really out there touching you? Just how crazy could you make someone by taking over and messing with their haptic interface? There will be fatalities, and they might be murder.
“Ick” doesn’t begin to cover it. But it’s going to be here soon.
- Marc Teyssier, Gilles Bailly, Catherine Pelachaud, Eric Lecolinet, Andrew Conn, and Anne Roudaut, Skin-On Interfaces: A Bio-Driven Approach for Artificial Skin Design to Cover Interactive Devices, in Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. 2019: New Orleans. p. 307-322. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3332165.3347943
- University of Bristol, Artificial skin creates first ticklish devices, in University of Bristol -News. 2019. https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/october/skin-on-interface.html
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