Taste, See, Hear, Feel, and Smell - Just a Dream

I've been thinking about the history of the television lately. Way back then when, Philo Farnsworth invented the television. These early televisions and cameras were simple devices. None of them had any color and they showed us the basic things things of our world in a somewhat fuzzy view. Yes fuzzy, remember rabbit ears?

Fast forward to the 21st century and you have HDTVs which can show every freckle in a human face and computer monitors that display more colors then even nature can show us. Our visual technology has even caused the computer revolution to grow and give us all what we wanted to see.

In a similar fashion, audio technology has also grown to a sea of listening devices to satisfy our need. So, now we have two senses out of the five basic senses covered - Hearing and Seeing.

Yet, for some reason, I'm not satisfied. There's still three more that need to be worked on. One technology area I hope someone will develop is that of feeling. Every so often, you just want to touch something, to feel it's texture, to feel it's warmth, to feel it's coldness. Just to feel, what is it! Is it fuzzy? Is it slimy? Is it arid?

When will the age of touch computing come to us? No, not that iPod Touch, but touch that we can feel and respond back too! Imagine a technology that will let you feel your brand new baby while your hundreds of miles away? Imagine a technology that will let you feel what it's like to pet a tiger without actually being next to one!

Yet, as of now, touch is being ignored. Let's compare shall we? The monitors of today have billions of dollars of money poured into R&D. There is also decades of engineering and refining with millions of man hours spent into making it better, from the first TV all the way to today's Plasma TV's. Also, don't forget the hundreds of years of still photography and artistry before that. After the display technology comes the distribution technology. Billions spent on satellites, cables, fiber optics, etc. Then after that is billions spent on matrix math, 3D graphics, ratification, vector graphics, chip design, graphics cards, etc etc etc. Thousands of people employed with billions of dollars devoted just to the sense of sight. Our sense of hearing has also received a smaller, yet just as dedicated amounts of human resources and devotion.

Touch, well just read this blog: Researchers Want to Add Touch, Taste and Smell to Virtual Reality. In the end, it mentions this: "Now all they need is money." Kind of funny isn't it? Billions (I might even say trillions if you consider all the people buying) spent on visual and audio computing, yet almost nothing spent on feeling. For the resources that's being spent on it, all this is just creating equivalent of the "Black and White TV" except for touch. Come on everyone, just maybe invest just 0.01% of what we spend on visual technology, we can create an industry that's just a large as visual computing and actually have a technology that people who are blind can use! Maybe one day.....