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UCL and MIT make cyber history with first internet touch
6 February 2003
Professor Slater (Computer Science) and PhD students Jesper Mortensen and Joel Jordan made tactile contact over the internet with experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, using a virtual handshake which stretched over 3,000 miles.
During the experiment two subjects in London and Boston manipulated a cube together. Though thousands of miles apart, the subjects could feel the force exerted by their virtual partner and worked cooperatively to move the cube across a visual virtual environment.
Professor Slater said: "We've been interested in making the interactions between people in a virtual reality world as real as possible and clearly touch was a means of enhancing their sense of being together."
The experiment was also conducted between UCL and the University of Southern California, Los Angleles at the subsequent Internet 2 conference in Los Angleles. The system could one day be used to allow users to manipulate virtual objects together, in remote training or applications such as tele-surgery.
The experiment was conducted using a hand-held device called PHANToM that sends small impulses at very high frequencies down the internet. These impulses imitate our sense of touch.
The experiment follows UCL's work to develop software for a HAPTIC interface - a device that stimulates touch - over network paths of extremely long distances.
To find out more about the project use the link below.
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