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With all the talk lately of WI-FI and Bluetooth, NTT Communications, may have found a new and incredibly eerie way for different electronic devices to communicate. And you are the conduit.
NTT has devised a new personal area networks technology called Red Tacton, which can apparently send date between products like your MP3 player, wireless phone, cordless headset, digital camera, or PC over the surface of your skin. YUsing Red Tacton, your epidermis can send data at a 2Mbps clip. Pretty creepy, no?
Transfer bodies of knowledge—using your body
It makes plenty of sense, though. Just imagine you’ve got a compatible phone in your hand and wireless headset clipped to your ear. Using Red Tacton, that is all you would need to transfer audio back and forth between the two devices. Data could not only transfer through different parts of your body, but also between two different bodies as well. Imagine being able to transfer music files by kissing someone on the cheek or exchanging digital business cards by smacking someone. High fives will never be the same.
NTT celebrates the body electric
Microsoft has also experimented with touch-sensitive data transfer, even being granted a patent last summer for “a method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body.” But NTT’s system is more practical because it does not require for sensors to come in direct contact with your skin. The sensors built into different compatible gadgets work fine within 20cm (about 7.8 inches) of your body. Instead of generating an electric current through you, Red Tacton uses the small electric field that is naturally on the surface of the human body, using a transmitter to modulate that field appropriately. While it doesn’t work quite the same way as your average pacemaker, Red Tacton could potentially pay huge dividends in the future of communications.
A whole new meaning to the term “networking”
What kind of boundless potential is there for an electronic network allowing us to transfer information naturally from within our bodies rather than without? Some people might think of it as a futuristic ESP, but it could quite possibly become the future of peer-to-peer communication. Personally, we would rather stop short of implanting microchips in our bodies, and this technology makes that concession. So next time you shake someone’s hand, watch it. They could be slapping the digital equivalent of a “kick me” sign on your back.
