Cybersex will never be the same... http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/headline/tech/1639327 Oct. 30, 2002, 5:53AM Trans-Atlantic touch via the Internet Reuters News Service LONDON -- Scientists in Britain and the United States shook hands Tuesday. No big deal, one might think, but the men in question were 3,000 miles apart, connected only by the Internet. In a technological first, two scientists -- one in London and one in Boston -- picked up a computer-generated cube between them and moved it, each responding to the force the other exerted on it. The devices allowing them to do it are called phantoms, which re-create the sense of touch by sending small impulses at very high frequencies via the Internet, using newly developed fiber optic cables and high bandwidths. "The experiment went very well," said Joel Jordan, part of a team of scientists at University College London, which has teamed up with colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to conduct the experiment. "You can actually feel the object being pushed against your hand," he said. UCL said the secret behind the technology is the speed at which the successive impulses are sent. "In much the same way that the brain reinterprets still images into moving pictures, the frequencies received by the phantom are similarly integrated to produce the sense of a continuous sensation," a UCL statement said. Not only can scientists feel the force being exerted by colleagues across the Atlantic, they can also feel the object's texture. "You can feel how rough something is, or how springy the side of the cube is," Jordan said. The implications could be vast. For example, trainee surgeons could practice via the Internet. It would also have recreational uses, letting people touch each other over the Internet.
