New Television Service Allows Viewers To Touch Virtual Objects

The virtualization of the world is constantly moving forward. New concepts are announced each day, and you can tell that the second coming of the virtual reality implementation is going to be the successful one. As some of you might remember, about a decade ago people were dreaming of virtual reality, but it never became popular. Today we’re more interested in the technology and soon, NHK is hoping to launch a new television service which will allow viewers to touch virtual objects.

The concept of making virtual objects into touchable entities is not exactly new. It has been around for quite some time now, usually within the education sector. But the technology has advanced quite a lot since the early beginnings, and now touching virtual objects is about to go mainstream. The system that NHK is developing is meant to add another service to your television experience.

Sound weird? Well, think of it as a way for you to shop through your television for example. You go onto your favorite website (as TVs are getting more and more webified), and you find what you think would be a cool object to buy. The problem with online shopping has always been that you can’t really touch the object you want to buy, therefore you are sometimes disappointed when you actually receive the product. With this service, you will be able to touch the virtual objects and feel what they’re going to feel like before buying them.

Furthermore, this system could of course be added to a whole lot of other mediums as well. Imagine for example watching a movie where you will be able to touch all of the things within a room. Suddenly the experience would be a whole lot more immersive, don’t you think? The virtual objects will have digital information added to them before going on set, and that makes the process a whole lot easier when offering this service. The system detects spatial position data for the fingertip in 1/1000 of a second. That’s something that will make the experience quite realistic. By the looks of it, our lives will forever be lived, not within the virtual world, but through the filter we would all call virtualization.

NHK’s Tactile System For Virtual Objects