Yeah, this is possibly the Frenchest idea imaginable.
I notice that basically all the advertised use cases would (and do) work just as well with any modern capacitive touch interface; they’ve just added “but imagine if it felt like skin!”
Which, I don’t dismiss the value of that. Cybernetics is about extending and reflecting human bodies, and making that explicit can help us understand and develop the way we interact with machines. But it does bring me to my other issue with the “ultra-realistic skin”, namely, compared to what living human being?
No way you can see the video while masturbating with this thing. Even a low level motion sensor hooked up naked body would tremble as fuck. Such a shitty design…
Yes, many many people have called out that this could (and would) be used for sex-related applications. But there are other potential applications.
While an arm that shoots glitter is cool, imagine if that same arm had a robotic hand that could feel her friends and family gripping it? This same type of arm may also be useful for paraplegics or quadriplegics.
Imagine a robotic caregiver that could attend an elderly person 24/7 and detect when their charge held their forearm. Touching warm somewhat squishy flesh may comfort the elderly person more than touching cold hard metal.
Imagine a doctor in New York City using a telepotence device to “touch” the skin of a patient in a disaster area (having a local section of synthetic skin react as the remote patient’s skin does) and use that in conjunction with sight and hearing to diagnose injury or illness? You could even have a group of doctors take shifts using the device (or maybe getting a second or third opinion by sharing the sensation) to treat patients 24/7 once the device has been transported to the scene.
Tying into the application just above, imagine training medical students to diagnose a rare and/or dangerous disease that would normally require them to touch an infected patient. Instead of keeping around a patient with that disease, have the robotic hand record how the skin of the infected patient feels and present that feeling to the students in the safety of the robotic medicine classroom. “Here’s what the skin of a patient suffering from ebola or malaria would feel like.” for example.
