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Five things you’ll one day be able to do via the internet
By Clare McDonald on November 22, 2013 3:37 PM
After a very surreal chat with a professor at City University London, I was filled in on the concept of multi-sensory human communication. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but Adrian David Cheok, professor of pervasive computing at City University, explained that in the future, the internet will allow communication that goes beyond just vision and hearing. He thinks that in the future we’ll go from sharing data to sharing “experience”.
After our chat, I felt full of hope about what the future would hold. A lot of companies now expect employees to travel abroad, and everyone knows the strain that can have on families and individuals when they can’t properly communicate with those at home. But what if we could taste, smell, hug and kiss via the internet? Professor Cheok explained that 60% of human communication is non-verbal, so although long-distance communication has come a long way, it still doesn’t suffice. Here are some of his ideas and projects for interactive technology in the future:
Touch
Sometimes you might have to go for a conference and your partner is at home, in another country, or in another time zone. You have a wandering thought about them and you wished they knew they were on your mind. The RingU was invented for this purpose, a device that allows users to send ‘bi-directional’ visual and physical messages to another paired ring. You can send vibrations and colours to represent your mood and thoughts. It’s not quite the same as being there in person or a phone call, but sometimes you want to send a quick gesture just to let someone know you’re thinking of them. It could even be used in business environments, for example there has been interest in the ring from financial firms who think it would be useful to help traders to receive real-time updates on the stock exchange. The ring could vibrate to inform them of a movement in the stocks they follow.
Taste
A lot of current scientific research surrounding taste involves using a mixture of chemicals to produce different taste sensations. Professor Cheok has created a device that uses electrical signals sent to the tongue to manipulate the brain into thinking it can taste certain things. The hope for this is that in the future, taste could be digitised so that people could share what they are eating via the internet. It could also be attached to eating utensils to change the way things taste as you eat them. Imagine eating a virtual lollipop; all the taste and no calories. This research is also linked with directly manipulating sensors in the brain to produce the sensation of taste or smell, similar to a technique already being used to treat depression.
Smell
Surprisingly this is something that is currently being produced, and is called ChatPerf. There’s a small device that plugs into your smartphone which can then emit a smell through a mixture of chemicals. If you wanted to share a food smell with someone, you could text it to them. You could sync it with your alarm clock to spray a coffee smell to get you going in the morning. There has even been the idea that you could use it to help you power through a diet, as smell and taste are so closely associated; you can spray the smell of beef to make your salad taste better. It could also be used for healthcare, using familiar smells to trigger memories for elderly patients, reminding them to do things such as take medication. Or it could be used in marketing to promote products such as fabric softener or deodorant.
Kiss
Cheok is currently working on a ‘bi-directional kiss messenger’ to simulate kissing via the internet. If you’re away from home for a long time, maybe you’re a jet setter, you can use these devices to call home and maybe even get a little kiss from your partner. You each plug the device into your smartphone, and the silicone pads simulate the movement of your partner’s mouth and lips.
Hug
Travelling for work can be really difficult, especially if you have kids (or cats) at home who don’t fully understand why you have to be away so often. A prototype device allowed a person to touch sensors on a doll which then transferred the pressure to a jacket on their pet. To widen this interaction to human communication, a ‘hugging pyjama’ was invented to allow the same interaction to take place between a parent and their child over long distance. This device allows you to hug someone at home from wherever you are in the world. Using pressure sensors, the jacket can apply pressure to the body in reaction to where you touch, giving the illusion that you are hugging them.
For more of Professor Cheok’s work, visit his website.
Computer science needs business and people skills, says professor
Karl Flinders Tuesday 22 October 2013 13:04
Universities need to broaden the teaching of computer science due to the growing mismatch between graduate skills and business IT requirements.
With businesses struggling to fill job posts and thousands of computer science graduates out of work, universities could play a critical role in averting an IT skills crisis by ensuring the UK is self-sufficient in IT professionals.
Such is the need for IT professionals with particular skills that the digital industry is calling for more overseas staff and startups want visa requirements relaxed to make it easier to bring in staff from overseas. London mayor Boris Johnson has also called for a special visa to help London businesses bring in the right IT skills.
Meanwhile, thousands of experienced and newly qualified IT professionals are unemployed, under-employed or working in jobs unrelated to their jobs.
Figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) show that computer science graduates are the largest group of unemployed graduates in the UK. Some 14% of recent computer science graduates are unemployed, compared with 13% of graduates in communications, 5% in education, 4% in veterinary science, and almost none in medicine and dentistry.
So what needs to be done to square the circle?
Combining technology and business skills
Speaking to Computer weekly, Adrian David Cheok (pictured), professor of pervasive computing City University in London, said UK graduates need to look beyond the basics of programming and must also understand business. For more on business handling, check out this recruitment company in Lehi.
“In the UK, just learning the basics of programming is not enough because it has become a commoditised industry. There are hundreds of thousands of graduates in India and China who are really good at programming, so a lot of these things can be outsourced,” he said.
“Graduates in the UK cannot just rely on the technical skills of programming. They have to become much more focused on the networking and business skills required to succeed,” said Cheok.
He said all jobs require human skills and computer scientists must use their people networks: “Every job, no matter what industry, is very much human focused – it is people who control entry to a job, control promotion, control opportunities; computers don’t hire people.
“So it is really critical for people to realise that one of the best ways to improve your career is to leverage your network. Your human network is critical, so when students are at university, it’s essential they build up a network and expand it.
“Almost all opportunities that come about are through people.”
Cheok said universities play an important role and need to change: “Universities must adapt to this too, with courses such as business and computing. Pure computer science is okay if you want to be a researcher or academic. Just knowing how to program in Java and C is no good because anyone can.”
Cheok is professor of pervasive computing at City University in London. He is researching multi-sensory human communication via mobile internet.
City University London explores multi-sensory human communication via mobile
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.
Technology is poised to become a feast for the senses…
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.”