The Digital Civilizations Interviews

The digital and the body come together

So much so that the digital is moving towards the body. The “second stage of the coevolution of man, technology, and machine,” to borrow Joël de Rosnay’s expression, is that of the direct connection with the body, even integration into the body, via biometrics, subcutaneous microchips (which some pets already have), direct interfaces between nerve endings and prostheses, brain-computer interfaces, or biochips ingested into the body.

Technological progress

These kinds of technologies are progressing rapidly: voice synthesis and recognition, movement recognition, tactile and haptic interfaces, 3D sound and images, “augmented reality,” and so on… And yet they seem currently confined to laboratories and specialized applications in the industrial, medical, military or gaming industries. It is time for a change of scale.

Prioritize the multi-sensory interfaces

Research programmes should henceforth focus on the invention, testing, and mass diffusion of multi-sensory interfaces that involve touch, hearing, gesture, movement, even smell, all the five senses together. And this with a clearly defined goal in mind: ensuring that in 10 years time, these interfaces are as commonplace and widely used as the screen and mouse are today (and that the latter two don’t disappear). The area of interfaces is the territory of a few specialists today, and is rarely considered as a “serious” priority of research and development programmes. But it should be elevated to number one. It is needed for us to have a new kind of human richness in our use of technology, and, probably, for us to invent applications and uses that we haven’t even dreamed of yet. Such a vision can take very concrete form. For example:

• Making long-distance interaction as sense-oriented as physical interchange.
• Inventing a tactile language that could be used in mobile phones.