Transcript

The Tactile Internet: Touch Me, Now You Can! | Mischa Dohler | TEDxKingsCollegeLondon

hello ladies and gentlemen boys and girls now before I start I want you to do one thing for me I want you to close your eyes close your eyes and I want you to imagine the internet right what do you see do you see Facebook online shopping Sasha Gray Twitter LinkedIn right that's what you see there's one thing you don't see anymore and that is cables computers electricity Supply you basically totally forgot about this massive infrastructure underlying the internet today and that's great internet has gone undergone a great transformation from a you know kind of a technology-driven artifact to a business and opportunity driven one and that's not the only internet which is undergoing that transformation we build another one for you we build a mobile internet for you right so your mobile phones they connect to the internet today almost seamlessly so you forget about whether I have coverage or no coverage it's just there when you need it and there's another internet we're currently designing which is very very exciting really which is the things internet so the Internet of Things imagine a world where all the objects sensors actuators are actually connected in real time it's a world where you know a cow in New Zealand farts and you will know because we will have smartphone applications which tell us that thing and people interested in that or my belly growing by another 10% and you will probably know before I do so you get the idea it's essentially a totally instrumented world now these internets which we have designed for you so the fixed internet uh the mobile internet and the things internet they have one thing in common they're able to transmit information right so it's video audio or some other type of information going from point A to point B but there's one thing these internets can't do and that is to transmit touch what we're doing right now here at Kings College London and with our colleagues globally we are pioneer a totally new internet which would allow us to transmit touch in real time to any point on this planet once we have it up and running what can we do so I could use my fingers to teach a child in Africa how to play the piano we could have our vhole Engineers use their skill to essentially Ser as a carn Asia we could have our King's College doctors perform health checks or even surgery in Sierra Leona that's what we could do that would be brilliant isn't it let's give a name to this internet and uh I want to share a personal story here about two years ago I met a a billionaire called Anthony Salim and he had a very big problem very very big problem uh he and his buddies and I'm sure some of you may have it he didn't know how to service his Fleet of private jets okay so the choice was either do it in Dallas so he had to fly them over to the United States or build a whole new facility in Asia now that was dramatic and you know he he said Amisha do you have an idea how we can get about that and you know in my routine talking to billionaires I had an idea and this is when it clicked when I say hey why don't we combine robotics artificial intelligence and Communications and networking to do exact what Salim needed I called it back then closing the data cycle okay from sensing processing and actuation a really ugly engineering name um which was good enough for the National Science Foundation in the United States to take it up into their program but fortunately a good friend of mine and a mentor of mine came along Professor G fettweis from dress University and with his colleagues he termed a fantastic uh term which is the tactile internet it's exactly what we want to do transmit touch through the I love that term because it's a beautiful continuation from our fixed internet mobile internet things internet and now we have the touch that tactile internet okay it's a it's a massive transformation from an information delivery Network to a um skill set labor delivery Network okay so the only thing we need to do now is is just to build it it's uh basically all an easy right to be honest with you except for one Minor Detail we need to break the laws of physics now let's go step by step imagine I want to touch the phase of a beloved one on the other side of the planet what do we need we need a robotic Edge we need a tactile sensor on the other side which takes that information on my end I need a Happ actuator which reproduces that feeling both of these areas are well explored we have different ways of doing that either real robotics or stimulating currents there's a lot of things we can do but this is not what the tactile internet is about the tactile internet the real challenge here is you need to do things very very quick and those who are Gamers In This Crowd or those who sat in a flight simulator they know that if the delay between between action and reaction is more than a millisecond you get Cyber sick okay and we don't want that so we have to make sure that the signals travels forth and back within a millisecond now the best we can do on this planet is speed of light speed of light 1 millisecond how much does it buy 150 kilm to go 150 kilm to come back that's nothing how can I have my my best doctors in in in Los Angeles is do an operation in in Sierra Leona it's impossible speed of light is so slow okay what do we do about it well people started working on this really Brute Force that's what they do trying to make the network quicker not realizing hey you know there's always that phenomenal limit so we started at Kings together with uh with Erics and at Telecom giant to get along that problem so we started essentially to see it from a different angle we said hey what do we need really to make that happen first thing we realized is we need a tactile codec the same way as we have a video codic a sound codic a an MP3 player type of stuff that we don't have it so we need to build that that allows us to mesh up different sensing streams we can have different people controlling things we currently developing that together with the center for robotics the other thing we do with our with my center for Telecom research we make the network more resilient because the last thing you want to happen is while somebody is doing a remote surgery on use you get a dropped call like you get in London right suddenly the thing doesn't work anymore you don't want that so we're working on this but the holy grail and that's what we do with our best guyses in artificial intelligence is essentially beating this limit on the speed of light so how do we do that it turns out that skill and what we do is very very repetitive also because our degrees of freedoms on doing things is not too large so what about having two predictive engines running on the other side of the planet and on my end basically predicting what I'm about to do in actuating on this in almost real time and I'm only transmitting an update of these type of artificial intelligence coefficients when there's a change in my actuation for which I have so much more time 50 milliseconds 100 milliseconds which gives me exactly the time to beat the speed of light to go to the other side of the planet right so that's what we're doing right now now I'm a Hands-On Guy having worked for a year in construction and uh when I do things I like to do a reality check a reality check whether people actually need what we are designing whether they want it so I went out to the Streets of London and I interviewed people so here you go [Music] not exactly sure what i' use it for I mean I write a food blog so there could be some possibilities about touching the food but um not quite sure how that could work it's amazing I think if we could do that it'd be like really like incredible and then you could use it for anything you could use it to like save people's lives like it could be like the next big thing it could be like changing amazing the kind of working with my hands is very important and also encouraging other people to kind of work with their hands my work is quite participatory and I use things like clay and concrete from building SES so that sort of tactile nature to um to the work that I make is quite interesting so the ideas you've just kind of uh suggested to me I I'd be really interested to see how that kind of develops cuz although it's kind of less tactile but it's still kind of uh how you could sort of um Use Your Hands Across the other side of the world like that is is quite an interesting thing to think about yeah I think it's a great idea I think the restrictions on internet at the moment are that you can literally share Visual and audio content but it's really difficult as a design person to actually get your you know hand aesthetic across um via the Internet if it's not something visual uh or audible um I think Christ and I currently if we're trying to work on a sculpture together and I'm in a different country or Chris is in a different country or even just a different place in in the city um we'll send pictures and we'll be like does this look right is this one right and we'll have to do the sculpture many times whereas if we could actually yeah physically do it through the internet do it through the internet so we you know I could control Chris's hands or even just what you could I don't know like do different stuff I could be like not like this more like this um for starters um and then I guess yeah if we were sort of branching out into other unseen territories if we were on a different planet we could start to I don't know manipulate the create something in a different world that perhaps the human couldn't go to MH I guess well said yeah I think it's a fantastic idea in my industry I work Finance wise but the industry actually I work in media um and TV post production I think it'd be absolutely fantastic I really think it would be beneficial from so as a creator of video series digital Futures which focuses on Tech for good I tend to keep a really close eye on advanced that have the capacity to impact our day-to-day lives the tactile internet for me is certainly one of them if we can see and hear things that aren't close by why shouldn't we be able to feel them right to be able to use data networks to relay actual human touch would be surreal and it's attainable to me I think the biggest reason to get excited about this is the potential for health and education then you've got the marrying of the Two Worlds of AI and the tactile internet you could remotely control humanoid robots who would be performing surgery or other public services it's the immersive nature of something like this that really lights my fire well I would play some games and I would I might want to play in there instead of about there and it would be so nice when you T your dad when he's traveling and then you can go through the computer and say hello and keep a while with him and then he can kiss him he can kiss him and he can kiss him so ladies and gentlemen beside all the creativity of the adults in the video it uh took again a child 6 years old to figure out that the ttile internet in 2030 will be used to bring love and peace to this planet thank you very much