With the explosive growth of the "smart" society, enormous amounts of information are instantaneously available in the enhanced world around us, or the cyberworld beyond. Hence one may wonder if the traditional human input/output modalities have the necessary bandwidth or expressiveness to effectively deal with the increasing pace of an "augmented world". The questions we are trying to address is if and how advances in semiconductor and information processing technologies may help to alter this unbalance?
A first-generation Human Intranet intended to boost human input-output performance will be developed. Given the limited two-year span, we plan to focus on just a couple of use cases. One would focus on hybrid sensory expansion, while another would enable higher information output throughput through low-SNR actuation devices (such as pressure sensitive on-skin keyboards). Prototype systems will be built using existing as well as emerging devices. These prototypes will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the techniques in terms of measurable parameters such as throughout increase, sensitivity enhancement, scope extension and learning complexity.
See the humanintranet workgroup for details.