Nov 9, 2020
Tactile Internet, bringing reality into the digital world
The Tactile Internet has the potential to dramatically change the way humans live, work and play
The Tactile Internet represents a “revolutionary level of development for society, economics and culture”.
What / How / When
What is it?
The Tactile Internet is considered as a new innovative communication method over the internet with features such as: high availability, ultra-low latency, reliability and security in order to reproduce human tactile reaction sense over internet applications.
The term Tactile Internet was first used in 2014 by Gerhard Fettweis a professor from the Technical University of Dresden (Germany).
“The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) defines the Tactile Internet as an internet network that combines ultra low latency with extremely high availability, reliability and security. It believes the Tactile Internet represents a “revolutionary level of development for society, economics and culture”.
The ITU has included the Tactile Internet in August 2014 in its Technology Watch, which assesses new technologies with regards to existing standards and their potential impact on future standardization.
How does it work?
Tactile Internet will enable real-time interactions such as humans-to-machines and machines-to-machines that mimic the same performance of human tactile reactions.
When?
On one hand many of the core technologies have been implemented for years, the main constrains remains the current networks.
The era of Tactile Internet can only really start once the 5G technology is going to be released in 2020.
In the meanwhile many organizations are now starting to compile standards around it.
Use Cases
Developing new technologies, architectures and products to enable extremely low-latency end-to-end communications to make the Tactile Internet vision a reality is one of the key challenges.
- Education: computers, robots and humans can interact in new ways and disrupt the way people learn. The haptic overlay of human and machines could for example redefine the way movement is going be thought or the way teachers can improve the physical performance of their students.
- Healthcare: the haptic overlay will enable any doctor in any location around the world perform remotely a wide variety of diagnosis and treatments. The Tactile Internet will open the door for enhanced human skills as a result of a combination of the doctor’s tactile sense with the spatial accuracy of robot-assisted operations.
- Energy: high availability, ultra-low latency, reliability are going to change the way energy is managed throughout the entire grid by minimizing the generation of unusable reactive power.
- Smart city: operations, traffic flow, space management, autonomous driving, safety, energy efficiency can all be optimized thanks to real-time operations and interactions between humans and machines.
- Culture and Arts: we as human will have new ways to interact with our surroundings. Human-to-human and human-to-machine interactions will change in nature as they will become seamless and will affect all aspects of society from people habits to the way our economy works.
Summary
Internet of Things is just the beginning of a digital transformation and the next evolutionary step of this transformation is the “Tactile Internet”, which will completely change the way humans and machines interact.
.. an exciting new era is coming.
References
- Picture Credits: https://unsplash.com/photos/U3sOwViXhkY
- What is the Tactile Internet: https://www.nsa.gov/What-We-Do/Research/SELinux/
