Multimedia and the Tactile Internet
Abdulmotaleb El Saddik · IEEE Multimedia · 2020
With the rapid development in the areas of multisensory hard- and software and the emergence of Tactile Internet, new media such as haptics, smell, olfaction, etc., nowadays, play a prominent role in making virtual objects physically tangible in a collaborative and/or networked virtual environment. By allowing users to feel each other's presence and physically manipulate objects from their interacted environments within 1 ms. The Tactile Internet facilitates fast multimodal interactions with multisensory information over the 5G network. 1 ms is a critical threshold in human perception of tactile response. For auditory response, this threshold is 100 ms and for visual response, it is 10 ms, which means delays above these thresholds are within the latency limit sensed by the human brain. In 4G, the round trip latency is 25 ms for an ideal environment. Clearly, that indicates 4G is not able to meet the requirements of tactile response. For this reason, the efforts to reduce latency in 5G are critical for Tactile Internet. Low-latency communications will also enable other digital twins’ applications such as real-time control of smart grid, self-driving car, and so on.