Tele-petting

Judi has picked up on another piece of Singaporean news:

Researchers have developed a cybernetic system to allow physical interaction over the internet. The system allows touching and feeling of animals or other humans in real time, but it's first being tried out on -- chickens.

Built by a wacky group of researchers at the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore, the Touchy Internet works as follows: You walk into your office, where a hollow, chicken-shaped doll sits on a mechanical positioning table close to your computer.

The doll whirs to life as soon as you switch on the system, duplicating the motion of a real chicken in the backyard whose movements are being captured by a webcam.

Fondling the doll translates into touching the real fowl.

...

The chicken feels your touch in the exact same place where the replica was stroked.

"This is the first human-poultry interaction system ever developed," said professor Adrian David Cheok, the leader of the team, who has been developing the technology for nearly two years.

...

The team is investigating the possibility of "internet hugging" and plans to develop an advanced haptic suit for humans, which will incorporate tiny air sacs, compressors and valves to impart a "high-fidelity" feeling of being hugged.

Both parties in the internet hug would have to wear haptic suits, and they would have to cuddle a human doll or a pillow embedded with pressure sensors. Adding a heartbeat and body-heat sensors would provide more intimacy.

-- "Eggheads invent tele-petting," Lakshmi Sandhana, Wired News (Emphasis mine)

The scary thing? This isn't even something out of Ananova!