The Hindu : U.S.-based Indian engineers transmit touch via Internet

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 11, 2003

National

National

U.S.-based Indian engineers transmit touch via Internet

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore July 10. "Hold my hand!", is something you can now say to a friend at the other end of the World Wide Web, and mean it — literally. Two Indian engineers working in the U.S. have announced successful research to transmit the sense of touch over the Internet.

"As far as we know, technology is the only way a person can communicate to another, the sense of touch he feels when he does something", says Thenkurussi Kesavadas, Adjunct Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo and founder-director of the University's Virtual Reality Laboratory (VRL).

The technology will, for example, allow medical students to feel the exact pressure of a scalpel as a surgeon, at the other end of the Internet performs an operation. Dr. Kesavadas feels the day is not far off when a doctor can make a medical diagnosis, feeling an organ for disease, from a distant location.

The researchers at VRL have used their technology to transmit the sensation of touching a hard or soft object... the ability to follow the contour of a particular shape. Immediate applications could be relatively trivial `fun things' — capturing the feel of a golf club's swing or a cricket bat's slash, that is transmitted by a coach. They call their system "sympathetic haptics" — the ability to feel what another person feels.

It uses Virtual Reality (VR) gloves to capture sensations like hardness or softness and transmit them via Internet to another computer terminal, where a person using a commercial robotic sensing tool called the "Phantom", can "follow" the sensations.

Dr. Kesavadas, belongs to Palakkad and did his B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering at the Regional Engineering College, Kozhikode, and his M.Tech at IIT Madras, before obtaining his doctorate from Pennsylvania State University in 1995.

His associate in the "Touch via Internet" project, is 25-year-old Mumbai-born Dhananjay Joshi, who did his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Vidyarthi Griha College of Engineering, Pune, and is currently pursuing his Masters degree at Buffalo.

The duo plan to publish the results of their research at the autumn meeting of the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Research & Development Expo to be held in Washington DC.

"Wired" News reports that they have already spun off a company, Tactus Technologies to promote their technology. In a privileged communication to The Hindu, Dr. Kesavadas suggests where haptic (touch) technology is headed: "I think touch is the `missing link' in the multimedia interaction, collaboration and training tools of today. Just as video and audio made Internet a more exciting place, I think haptics will make it an even more realistic medium for exchanging information. Just imagine touching your parents over the Internet or teaching a child to write or play the violin... . The future is going to be very `realistic' for sure."

The website of the Buffalo VR Lab is www.vrlab.buffalo.edu and Prof Kesavadas can be contacted at kesh@eng.buffalo.edu.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National