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Actually, the virtual touch feature opened up, along with its possibility, a can of worms. How can you trust the sensation you get from touching a virtual cashmere wool shawl? Will it correspond to the real one you will get from the one delivering by the UPS drone? Is the eventual difference to be blamed on the application you used, on the prosthetics giving you the touch feeling or was it an intentional cheating from the seller who created a model that is “just so” slightly different from the original?
Besides, touching is a subjective sensation. What you feel when you pat your kid is difficult to relate to what your kid feels through that patting. Of course that goes for all sensation. If my perception of that green colour the same as yours? Virtuality just throw in the equation some more uncertainties.
Anyhow, in this case it worked. Joseph’s kid felt your closeness when you touched his ankle and it felt good to both of them. And in the end the sprain was milder than first thought, as Joseph discovered once he got home and started to look into the leakage of the draining system, assisted, so to say, by his kid that wanted to know everything about it. What was the draining system? How does it work? Why was there a leak? How would dad fix it?
Joseph would have loved to be able to answer all those questions, but at least for some he had the answer, more than that, he could “show” the answers to his son.
The leak has already stopped because the house management system closed the water intake. So there was no pressure to fix it, but to make it sure that water flow could be restore to prepare dinner…
Using augmented reality and the modelling of the house it was quite straightforward to see through the walls the plumbing system and that could be shared with his son pointing with his hand to the various ducts. Finding the origin of the leak was a bit trickier since the model did not provided any indication but by looking at the position of the pipes and how they joined with one another it was possible to make some reasonable assumption on where the problem might be.
If it were not for the annoyance of the leak, Joseph would have been mesmerized, and appreciative, of the easiness of home maintenance these days, with the possibility of seeing inside the walls like if he had superpowers, whilst it was just a combination of digitalization of his house made by the constructor (actually the house was first created digitally, the design was explored through virtual reality, and was partly constructed from the digital blueprint using 3D printing facilities, partly on site and partly at some manufacturing factory).
To make it certain of the origin of the leak Joseph dropped a tiny pill-like maintenance kit including a camera in the basin and let it sink with the water through the draining pipes. A magnetic wand, not too much different from the one doctors are using to check the status of his artery at his last check up, let him direct the camera through the pipes exploring the internal surface till he found the leak point. A tiny fissure, may be caused by some structural stress as the house moved a bit as result of heat and cold. Luckily it was possible to fix it from the inside using the maintenance kit and operating it with his hands. Actually, he was using augmented hands with a glove like prosthetic, that was emitting radio signals to map the movements of its hand and finger with the actions to be executed by the maintenance kit.
In spite of technology and augmentation making Joseph life a bit easier, the stress remains in his and many other people life. Possibly because stress is part of life and living implies, at least sometimes, to feel stressed.
Joseph was reflecting on this things as he went to bed and possibly that was why he found difficult to sleep and get a rest. One of the thing on his mind was the realisation of the continuity existing between his body, and self, and the ambient, both the near and the remote one. The seamless way he could touch his son from afar, the interaction with various autonomous systems, both the ones being part of his work and the ones being part of his home. It really gave the impression, now that he thought about it, that he was living in symbioses with many objects and systems and the fact that it only occurred to him to think about this now was a further proof on the integration, of the seamless symbiotic relationship, that has become his way of life.
