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As part of the human augmentation studies carried out in the IEEE FDC Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Initiative consideration is being given to the sense of touch. We often underplay the relevance of our touch, considering it well below seeing and hearing, yet it is a very important sense (it would be almost impossible to pick up an object with no sense of touch -have you ever tried to pick up something with your hands freezing in a snowy icy day? Your fingers feel numb and it gets very difficult to pick up an object – and mind you, in that situation you still have some touch sensation created by the joints…).
A few companies have been studying how to recreate the sensation of touching an object in conjunction with e-commerce and with Virtual Reality. In both situation the opportunity of touching what is been shown would be a plus. Are you deciding to buy a scarf? Touch it and feel how soft and warm it is…
Tactai, a US start up that has presented the first products at CES 2017, if offering an electronic thimble that stimulates your finger sense of touch via vibrations. By modulating those vibration it is possible to recreate a variety of sensations, actually tricking your brain into believing you are really touching a surface (it can also provide softness and hardness, wet and sticky sensation but it does not provide you with warm/cold sensations, since these depend on nervous termination that are not triggered by vibrations). There are other companies that are working to let us “touch”, virtually, bits and get the feeling of touching atoms.
What about being touched? Not to worry. Also in this area there are companies that are working to provide that sensation (see video clip).
Teslasuit is a company that does just that. They have created a sort of wetsuit, a much more sophisticated one, that using electrical stimulation can trick your body into feeling it is being touched. It can even create warm and cold sensation (to a certain point). They have released, in addition to the suit, a haptic library of software modules that can be used to stimulate different parts of the body (in case you are wondering … no, there is no provision for those specific parts you were thinking about…). Their idea of application is today focussing on gaming but it will be up to application developers to identify new areas.
Again, there are other companies at work to provide the sensation of being touched.
So, on the one hand we have the possibility to touch “bits” feeling them as atoms, and on the others we have the possibility of being touched by bits, as if they were atoms. This is were the question I used as header of this post comes from.
I already mentioned in several posts the trends towards the creation of digital twins. We already have specific digital twins managed by the Government (they got my fiscal identity and associate it with what medicine I buy, with houses I own, with financial transactions I make… and probably more), digital twins managed by shops and department stores, by restaurant, by airlines companies (they call them “fidelity cards”….). Google probably know more about myself than … myself (that is because I forget, Google does not!
Some shops are giving the option of creating a digital representation of your body so that they can tailor wearables (like shoes, sweaters….) to you for the best possible fit. Others are asking for your digital body self to create avatars that you can use to see yourself in a certain on line space.
Others, I am pretty sure, are working to create a digital copy of you from the images of you available on the web. The possibilities offered by image analyses (including the face Id of the iPhone X) are huge and it is no longer a problem to create a faithful digital twin of your body (our body).
At this point one could decide to touch your digital body twin using one of the above devices, and you might have hundreds, millions!, people around the world touching you. Well, may be that is unlikely, but what about an app offering to touch that actor/actress you are watching now in the movie?
Would you think there could be a market for that? Should that market be regulated? What kind of rights will we have on our digital twins? Should you become aware that somebody is touching you?
Yes in a way it is like saying that we need to have control on our photos (and we know we don’t), like saying you can determine who has the right to see it and who doesn’t. However, once a photo is on the web you no longer control it. Given that a digital twin of your body can be created from a photo (actually a few of them, the more the better…) the same should apply to that as well.
And then you have the possibility of somebody touching your digital twin, may be somebody else using your digital twin to create and avatar to interact with, may be using that avatar to create a movie…
You see what I mean: we are on a slippery slope where there is a need to define the rules of “virtual” privacy before it becomes … virtual (i.e. no more real).
