What if we could “touch” online? Introducing the Tactile Internet | Zhanwei Hou

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Zhanwei Hou and his wife became parents for the first time. Current technologies allowed him to stay in contact with his his family, who were living thousands of kilometres away, using video and voice calls. But Zhanwei found himself wondering how much better it would be if there was a way to ‘touch’ over the internet. For long-distance communication using touch, the Tactile Internet, the major bottleneck is the communication delay, which is limited by the speed of light. To tackle this problem, Zhanwei believes we need to leverage AI and data science to reduce the communication delay significantly. Dr. Zhanwei Hou is a researcher in the Centre for IoT and Telecommunications at the University of Sydney. He is making great strides in the field of Tactile Internet, developing a low-latency communication method – one which would reduce communication delays – which he hopes will one day allow users to experience touch over the internet.