VR pioneer Jacki Morie, who advised XPRIZE's recent challenge to create a real life, robotics and VR-powered avatar, has a fascinating post on XPrize's blog where she considers the state of online technology now connecting us across borders -- especially while so many of us in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic:
Will the human-to-human relationships initiated and maintained [online] provide what we fundamentally need? Certainly, these mechanisms of togetherness will allow us to communicate, to conduct business, play together, and to virtually travel and experience digital recreations and immersive video of distant destinations.
But something is missing in this imagined post-pandemic future. What happens to human touch—that physical connection—when our primary means of coming together is digital? In present day, we know that babies who are never touched fail to thrive. We, humans, require touch; our skin is our largest sensory organ and informs our very being and sense of self. Absent this, how do we thrive as humans in an immaterial world?
She imagines a not-too-distant future where we will use robotics-driven avatars to visit and interact with remote friends and relatives, and "touch" each other through Internet-enabled haptics devices. That technology itself already exists, and she has tried it out first-hand:
"A year ago I was able to try a product that three companies combined to make," Jacki tells me. "Their consortium is called Converge and with their tech one can put on haptic gloves and control a robotic arm (or two!) and actually feel the objects that the robotic hand is feeling. Quite amazing and convincing, especially for this early on."
But can artificial touch become a meaningful replacement for human-to-human touch?
"Yes, eventually. There's some decades of technological advances to be made. Companies like SynTouch are starting that type of work already."
It's technology like this that may change how we perceive the concept of "avatar", currently an online virtual world/game concept, versus what XPRIZE is funding now -- a physical, mechanized representation:
"They may serve two different purposes, or one day they may be interconnected," Jacki speculates. "Fundamentally there is no reason we couldn't use digital avatars to control physical ones, but the interface we would need to control the digital version would have to be much more advanced, and allow the return haptic feedback to the human, who would most likely be wearing a more futuristic version of the Tesla Suit."
More on this at the XPRIZE blog. While the technology will certainly be important for countless practical use cases, I'm deeply skeptical it will ever compete with human-to-human touch on a social or emotional level. Then again, we are now in a pandemic overthrowing many of our deeply held assumptions, and that skepticism may be one of them.
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