Tactile Internet
Is it possible to touch your daughter’s cheek while you are talking to her via Skype? Or to take a piano class from Tokyo if you’re in London? In a near future, it will be.
What exactly is Tactile Internet
Developers are working on the 5G, which is expected to come in 2020. Much faster, much longer and much better than the 4G we have nowadays. What might surprise you is that by 2020 about 26 billion devices will be connected to the Internet.
Tactile Internet goes further. The term ‘Tactile Internet’ was first introduced by Professor Gerhard Fettweis from the Technical University of Dresden in Germany in 2012, while working on control robotic systems remotely and in real time.
It was King’s College London professor Mischa Dohler that made ‘Tactile Internet’ something more than “remote control”. His idea was to close the data cycle in order to improve communications. So it is not about just seeing or hearing things far away, but also the opportunity to transmit accurately the equivalent of human touch using the bits and bytes of data networks.
The role of the Internet of Things
To make Tactile Internet possible, there is the need of having devices that can read and understand the codes to be able to make the functions we want. Those devices or “things”, must be connected to the faster Internet we have mentioned before. It is necessary to find a way to encode touch, then transmit the data and at the end make the user able to receive the sensation he or she is looking for.
Users are demanding a world in which they’d be able to feel the emotions and sensations that in a past, they were not able to. The world we live in changes fast and the Internet is no exception. Tactile Internet allows users to experience new sensations in perfect synchronization with no time-lag.
Think about a daily example of it: the e-commerce applications of Tactile Internet. You would be able to touch and see what you are about to buy on yourself without having to actually have purchased it already. This may sound like something out of a Star Trek movie but just wait a few years and you will not be thinking about it because you will be using it.
When Tactile Internet meets thethings.iO
Which is the relation between Tactile Internet and thethings.iO? thethings.iO connects devices to the Internet. To make Tactile Internet possible we must have Internet-connected “things”. Do not you see the relation yet?
