Everyone is talking about sex work and all I can think of is Zuck gently pushing on one side of your face to try and force you to focus on an ad for at least 1500ms.
Oh, it won't be 'mandatory'. It'll just require 26 hours of effort in a day to not engage or you'll need to put up with substantial weakness on the job and personal relationship (friendship and romantic) markets.
Luckily, I am old enough to not be bothered by that. Friends who pressure me into using something I dont want to use, are not really friends, and therefore disposable. And dont get me going on the online dating bussiness. I wouldn't want to touch someone who seriously believes looks are the primary factor for choosing a mate. No thanks, I already know some shallow people, no need to find more.
Wait until you're in a nursing home and can't go join your friends for Hyper-Bingo(TM) because it's all run through the Meta app due to an agreement between the nursing home and Meta. Bonus points if you chose the home before the partnership but don't have the money or mental capacity to leave.
It's never a problem for you until it is.
Oh, and best hope that there are enough people offline to be a viable dating pool for you... (this is my problem as a gay person who doesn't like online dating- I've accepted I'll just be single but most people won't do that, they'll give in).
Jokes aside, I don't have a Facebook account, but that causes me to miss out on a few things that have value and are hard to replace:
1] In some cases, public services announce things on facebook and not their official website
2] Community forums and discussion; people who do use facebook generally tell me what's going on in town, but that might not be true for others. Facebook owning and privatizing and locking up behind a login wall the town square is wrong and detrimental to us all.
3] The marketplace for secondhand goods -- garage sales, craigslist stuff, a lot of ebay type stuff, all of it has moved to facebook in many places
4] Not being on facebook does put me in contact with fewer people, perhaps that costs me unknown opportunities
Of course, I gain a bunch of things by not using facebook, too.
Imagine, in the future, "onlyfans" people and sexworkers might connect a suit you wear with a mannequin with sensors at their location .
But more interesring is remotely piloted robots that do manual work like assembly line or warehouse stuff. Remote operators will be able to touch and feel stuff and use ML assisted automation of repetitive tasks. I think that is the future not complete replacement of people.
I strongly agree, the innovation needed is in haptics on the actuator side.
Can you expand on the static and low frequency? My impression was that if you're aiming for fingertips, higher frequency has more resolution. Iirc braille is mostly sensed by the vibration of the ridges of your fingerprint, when moving your finger over the dots. For this reason single character braille displays never really took off, you need an entire row (typically 40 characters) to make a usable refreshable braille display.
It's made with "standard" multilayer pzt actuators, with a displacement of 1000nm at 60V. That's apparently above the sensing threshold, but imho not enough for practical applications.
I am curious about the fabrication methods though. The 1mm actuators are in a checkerboard pattern, and apparently reflow soldered. I'm curious how they did that while staying below the curie temperature of the actuators (typically <150°C for PZT), and if that is mechanically sufficient.
Perceptual modes are specific mechanical stimuli we learned to recognize as specific sensations.
Some of them are: stiffness which is skin indentation and tendons strain in function of space, vibrations which is skin indentation in function of time for frequency above 10/20 hz.
These modes resides a bit on the neurophysiology of touch (how mechanoreceptors respond) and a bit on how we learned to recognize touch sensations.
The problem reside that the first thing you want to do is manipulate, not simply touch.
Manipulation is a bitch because it mostly needs small indentation of the skin which are 1-3 mm of continuous displacement at 1 mm resolution under the fingertip.
They piezo they are using displaces 1 mm at the resonance frequency, I imagine 150 hz (I believe?) or something similar, not in continuous (again, I believe).
Which means that a contact on the sensor is rendered as a local vibration, which requires a lot of mental gymnastic to think of it as a contact.
That is the haptic metaphor. Basically you expect an indentation and you get a vibration, and this sucks and for users.
If they got it in static displacement that is cool and might be something noteworthy
Displacement is 1000nm, so 3 orders of magnitude less than 1mm. As for frequency response, looks like they tested up to 1000Hz. I see no reason why it wouldn't work at any frequency from 0Hz up to 1000Hz, and even higher. But because the displacement is so small you really need the higher frequencies to be able to sense the actuation.
That's just piezo's, you need to stack several layers to get a usual displacement. You do get high force, so they're typically used for high precision positioning.
I've been looking at piezo bimorph actuators as used in braille displays. Because they're cantilevered you're trading displacement for force (and size). That could perhaps be used to create a high resolution array with enough displacement at low frequency. Not really wearable like a glove, but certainly portable.
So the person actually petting the dog, for example, will get some muffled interaction, while the person receiving the telehaptic will get some gross approximation. Sounds pretty lame if you ask me. Why not model the touch response of the dog and just stimulate that without the need for the transmitter? The "real-time" aspect of this seems like a gimmick that could be achieved in better ways.
EDIT: allowing myself to be open-minded, perhaps if the "tactile rendering" is good enough, you could somehow insulate it from the acquisition and have a fabric with both. This might make for a compelling device. Both you and anyone you share the touch with would feel roughly the same thing? Of course larger forces would be impossible, but you could play a very interesting game of Draw an Object on Your Back.
Some might be amazed to find the Stripe or Cloudflare CTOs here mopping up the PR disasters their companies "limited customer support" caused but I am amazed I find the creator of one weird video I watched many years ago I could never forget. How old is it actually? dailymotion says 7 years but I feel I watched it at least 15 years ago.
Welcome to the Metaverse.