Africa Digital Economy Forum

What is an Internet of Senses?

It allows humans to have digital sensory experiences similar to the ones we experience in the physical world. Visual, audio, and haptic which allow this to happen. The IOS augments our senses beyond the boundaries of our bodies, giving us augmented vision, hearing, touch, and smell. It enables us to blend multisensory digital experiences with our local surroundings and interact with remote people, devices, and robots as if they were beside us.

The IOS will transform digital experiences to fully immersive by making them multisensory. The  Sensory experience delivered over the networks is the essence of the IOS and can be demonstrated through use cases such as five senses merged reality, immersive communication, remote operation of machinery, all senses online shopping, and sustainable vacations in virtual reality.

Going Deeper: The IOS will require many technological advances in devices and sensors to make the XR experience as indistinguishable from reality as possible. Also into consideration is multisensory and holographic communication. It will enable increased presence in meetings by allowing avatars or photo-realistic human representations that behave as if they are physically present in the room with you. Multisensory extensions to such holoportation technology will over time increase the level of immersion by adding realistic interchange of more than sound and images such as touch and smell.

Augmented Humans: A rise in the number of body augmentation capabilities that will enable humans to be smarter, stronger, and more capable than we are today. The arrival of contact lenses that can take pictures or video or even show augmented reality content, universal translator earbuds that allow us to communicate anywhere in the world. Also a nonintrusive brain -computer interface (BCL) i.e being able to give commands to a device by just thinking of it, or use reading of muscular activity to navigate an AR interface naturally.

Source: https://www.ericsson.com/en/6g/internet-of-senses