Month: January 2014

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240207633/Financial-traders-could-soon-use-multi-sensory-human-communication

Karl Flinders Tuesday 22 October 2013 11:20

Researchers at City University London, are in talks with the finance sector about using wearable technology to provide trading executives with real-time data 24 hours a day.

The catering and healthcare industries are also interested in using pervasive computing currently in development.

Adrian David Cheok, professor of pervasive computing at the university, said people are currently fully focused on screens for information and there is a limit to what can be absorbed. By sending messages through touch and smell via the mobile internet rather than just audio-visual data, humans can consume more information.

With developments such as big data technology and 4G there is more information available 24/7, but a limited ability to absorb it.

Cheok and his team have developed a ring that can receive a message over the internet. This ring can be connected to an application that monitors big data. If there are changes in things such as stock prices, a message could be sent to the ring through the sense of touch.

“[A finance firm] is looking to use the ring for real-time data for finance professionals because you can’t be in front of your terminal 24 hours a day. But there are certain stocks and indicators they have to always monitor,” said Cheok. “By having something very personal on your body, like wearable technology, 24 hours a day they can, for example, get information about whether a stock is going up or down.

“The thing is we have access to infinite data, but to effectively interact with that data and in the physical world we need to use all of our sense for communication. Basically right now we’re using all of our concentration on screens so there is a limit to how much we can absorb and we can’t always be looking at a screen, you have to do things with your body.”

He said the research team is also talking to a Michelin star restaurant Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain, about supporting its advertising.

“The restaurant can fit only a limited number of people in every night, and they want to expand their customer base. How do they do that? They already have a website with photos, but people can’t understand the experience. We’re working with them to make an app, not only will you see the food, you’ll be able to smell it as well. This virtual sense of presence experience so advertising and marketing can benefit,” he said.

“It’s a good example of where audio visual data isn’t enough, if you want have experience of food, then taste and smell are essential, we need to bring in all of the senses, to communicate through the internet, so this is a real-world example of how this could be used,” added Cheok.

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Smell is connected to the limbic system in the brain, it can directly trigger memory

-Adrian David Cheok, City University London

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The healthcare industry is also looking at technologies being developed by the team. For example, smells can be automatically triggered in the room of a patient as a reminder to take medication.

“Smell is connected to the limbic system in the brain, it can directly trigger memory. We’re discussing with a group working with dementia patients and the biggest problem is they forget their medication and because smell directly affects memory and emotions it can be used to remind patients to take medication,” he said.

Cheok demonstrated a smell being transmitted over the internet to a mobile phone (pictured, above). This uses a chemical pack attached to a phone and a message will trigger a smell. About 10,000 of these have already been sold in Japan and the City University team expects to bring them to the UK soon.

Other innovations in development include a “hugging pyjama” that can be used by parents to hug children when they are not around. The concept could have applications in the care industry. A person hugs a jacket and it sends a message to the jacket being worn by the recipient who feels the hug.

Cheok began looking at augmented reality about 15 years ago when it was still very early research and he wanted to create augmented reality systems. He received a military grant to work on augmented reality for soldiers to help them to understand their environment in urban combat.

Interview in Belfast Telegraph

Communication is moving beyond barriers, says Rhodri Marsden

04 JANUARY 2014

Websites and apps are frequently described by their creators as offering a ‘rich experience’. The beautiful designs, intuitive layouts and compelling interactivity may well be engaging and satisfying to use, but when they’re hailed as being a ‘feast for the senses’, it’s evident that they’re a feast for merely two.

Online entertainment is about sight and sound; everything is mediated through a glass panel and a speaker, leaving us well short of being immersed in an alternative reality.

But with studies having demonstrated that more than half of human communication is non-verbal, scientists have been working on ways of communicating touch, taste and smell via the internet.

“What do you smell?” asks Adrian Cheok, professor of pervasive computing at City University London. The whiff of melon is unmistakable; it emerged from a tiny device clipped to an iPhone and was triggered by Cheok standing on the other side of the room.

In the shorter term, the applications of these devices seem slightly frivolous. “Fortunately, or unfortunately,” he says, “that’s where they’ve decided that the money is.

“But we need to explore the boundaries of how these things can be used, because scientists and inventors can’t think of all the possibilities.”

Our transition to an internet of all the senses is evidently dependent on the breadth of information that can be conveyed from one person to another as a series of zeroes and ones. “You have to find a way of, say, transmitting smell digitally, without using a sachet,” says Cheok. Few of us can conceive of the pace with which technological power is developing. Ray Kurzweil(author, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google) predicts that, by 2025, we’ll have a computer which has the processing power of the human brain. Cheok sees this as a hugely important tipping-point for society.

Society will also have to work out how it’s going to handle the hyper-connectivity of a multisensory internet – bearing in mind that we can already become deeply frustrated by the few kilobytes of information contained within the average overloaded email inbox.

“Our brains haven’t changed to cope with infinite communication,” says Cheok. “We don’t have a mechanism for knowing when there’s too much, in the way that we do when we’ve eaten too much.

“Communication is not just a desire, it’s a basic need – but we’ve gone from being hunter-gatherers in groups of 20, or 30, to being in a world of infinite data. We could literally gorge on communication and be unable to stop.”

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher of communication theory, famously used the term “global village” to describe the effect of connected media upon the world’s population.

Cheok believes that new sensory-communication channels will demonstrate how prescient that prediction was.

“For most of human history, we didn’t have privacy,” he says. “Everyone knew who was doing what. And these developments will mean that we become more and more open; almost bringing us back to the way that life used to be in hunter-gatherer times. Except, of course, it’s now global.”

The implications of the work of Cheok and his contemporaries seem to sit midway between exciting and terrifying, but in the shorter term it’s about focusing on relatively mundane objectives, such as emitting multiple odours from a smartphone.

“People will get used to this new mode of communication,” says Cheok, “and develop new languages.

“We don’t yet have a language of smell, or touch. But, combined with emotion and the subconscious, it’ll bring a heightened sense of presence.

“I’ve no idea what that will feel like, but I’ve always believed that human communication goes far beyond the logical.”

Interview article from The Independent:
By Rhodri Marsden

Websites and apps are frequently described by their creators as offering a “rich experience”. The beautiful designs, intuitive layouts and compelling interactivity may well be engaging and satisfying to use, but when they’re hailed as being a “feast for the senses”, it’s evident that they’re a feast for merely two.

Online entertainment is about sight and sound; everything is mediated through a glass panel and a speaker, leaving us well short of being immersed in an alternative reality. But with studies having demonstrated that more than half of human communication is non-verbal, scientists have been working on ways of communicating touch, taste and smell via the internet, and many of those experiments have been gathering pace.

“What do you smell?” asks Adrian Cheok, professor of pervasive computing at City University London. The whiff of melon is unmistakable; it emerged from a tiny device clipped to an iPhone and was triggered by Cheok standing on the other side of the room. “Right,” he says. “These devices have been commercialised in Japan – they’re selling 10,000 units a month – and they’re bringing smells into a social interface.” It’s still early days with this technology; the device I’m holding is similar to an inkjet printer in that it contains a melon “smell sachet”, and when it’s empty you have to buy another one. Nor is it a particularly new concept; in 1999, Wired magazine ran a front cover story about a company called Digiscents that had produced a USB “personal scent synthesiser” for your computer called the iSmell. Digiscents folded two years later. But the technology that failed to excite us back then now looks slightly less gimmicky in the context of modern smartphone usage, with its super- connectivity and emoticons galore.

On the surface, Cheok’s projects are fun, almost throwaway. “I’ve worked on hugging pyjamas,” he says. “They consist of a suit you can put on your body to virtually hug someone, remotely. Then we have these small haptic rings; if I squeeze my ring someone else will feel a squeeze on theirs through the internet – like a remote sensation of hand-holding.” He’s also been working on a device with electrodes that excites taste receptors on the tongue,  producing an artificial sensation of taste in the brain. Similar work is also under way at the National University of Singapore, where a team of researchers is constructing a “digital  lollipop” that fools the tongue into experiencing sweet, salt, sour or bitter tastes.

In the shorter term, the applications of these devices seem slightly frivolous; Cheok’s rings, for example, are being turned into a product that the music industry plans to sell to fans. “You go to the concert,” he says, “the pop star would send a special message, and if you’re wearing the ring you’d get a squeeze on your finger.” I grimace slightly, and he laughs.

“Fortunately or unfortunately,” he says, “that’s where they’ve decided that the money is – but we need to explore the boundaries of how these things can be used, because scientists and inventors can’t think of all the possibilities. For example, Thomson Reuters has been in touch to ask about using the rings to send  tactile information about stock prices or  currency movements.”

Our transition to an internet of all the senses is evidently dependent on the breadth of information that can be conveyed from one person to another as a series of zeroes and ones. “You have to find a way of, say, transmitting smell digitally, without using a sachet,” says Cheok.

“So I’m working with a French neuroscientist, Olivier Oullier, on a device which can produce an artificial sensation of smell through magnetic actuation. The olfactory bulb in our nasal cavity that’s responsible for smell can be stimulated by pulsing magnetic fields. So this is about directly exciting the brain’s neural path by bypassing the external sensor – in this case the human body.”

This immediately plunges us into what seems like incredibly futuristic territory, where brains are communicating sensory information directly with other brains across digital networks. But it’s already been demonstrated by the synthetic neurobiology group at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) that optical fibre can be connected to neurons, and Cheok is excited about where this may lead in the relatively short term. “We will have direct connection to the brain within our lifetime,” he says, “although what level that will be I’m not sure. Physical stimulation of neurons may not produce the effects that we would hope for and predict.”

Few of us can conceive of the pace with which technological power is developing. Ray Kurzweil (author, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google) predicts that by 2025 we’ll have a computer which has the processing power of the human brain, and by 2045 it’ll have the processing power of six billion brains – ie, everyone on the planet. Cheok sees these as hugely important tipping points for society.  “If you’re able to download your brain to a computer, there are major philosophical questions that we’ll have to deal with in the next 30 years, such as whether we’re human, or whether we’re computers.”

Society will also have to work out how it’s going to handle the hyper-connectivity of a multisensory internet – bearing in mind that we can already become deeply frustrated by the few kilobytes of information contained within the average overloaded email inbox. Text messages that are not replied to already provoke consternation – what about unreciprocated touches, provocative odours or unwanted tastes?

“Our brains haven’t changed to cope with infinite communication,” says Cheok. “We don’t have a mechanism for knowing when there’s too much, in the way that we do when we’ve eaten too much food. Communication is not just a desire, it’s a basic need – but we’ve gone from being hunter-gatherers in groups of 20 or 30 to being in a world of infinite data. We could literally gorge on communication and be unable to stop. We’ll have to find new norms and new mechanisms, but it’s difficult to  predict what they will be.”

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher of communication theory, famously used the term “global village” to describe the effect of connected media upon the world’s population; it has become overused, but Cheok believes that new sensory-communication channels will demonstrate how prescient that prediction was. “For most of human history, we didn’t have privacy,” he says. “Everyone knew who was doing what. And these developments will mean that we become more and more open – the end of secrecy, almost bringing us back to the way that life used to be in hunter-gatherer times. Except, of course, it’s now global. A lot more people will know.”

The implications of the work of Cheok and his contemporaries seem to sit midway between exciting and terrifying, but in the shorter term it’s about focusing on relatively mundane objectives, such as emitting multiple odours from a smartphone. “People will get used to this new mode of communication,” says Cheok, “and develop new languages. We don’t yet have a language of smell, or of touch; exactly the same pressure in terms of a touch can have a  completely different response in the brain, depending on context. But combined with emotion and the subconscious, it’ll bring a heightened sense of presence. I want us to be able to eat together across the internet. I’ve no idea what that will feel like,” he adds, smiling, “but I’ve always believed that human communication goes far beyond the logical.”