••• online research
Ericsson, King’s College London partner to create tactile Internet
As reported by U.K. media outlet Smart Chimps, Swedish technology firm Ericsson and King’s College London have joined in a research project to create an Internet that users can literally touch, called the tactile Internet. The pair have announced collaboration on researching 5G, the next generation of mobile connectivity, to address both technical implications and societal challenges towards the development of a tactile Internet.
Professor Mischa Dohler, head of King’s College London’s center for telecommunications research in the department of informatics, said, “Currently we can see and hear through the Internet, but we cannot touch; we have a vision to create the tactile Internet, where we would be able to touch through the medium of the Internet.”
5G is expected to begin its commercial rollout in 2020, by which time Ericsson believes that there will be up to 50 billion connected devices in the world, mainly in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. 5G networks will enable a wide variety of use cases such as evolved mobile broadband services, a range of M2M communication and media distribution.
Experimental activities will include the setup of a 5G tactile Internet lab with test bed capabilities, enabling the easy creation, testing and real-time adaptation radio technology in software. This will occur both in devices and remotely as part of Cloud RAN experimentation. An Ericsson King’s College London 5G tactile Internet showroom will showcase developed prototypes and connect to real-time live test beds in London and globally.
••• neuromarketing
Can brain waves predict box office?
A new study suggests that people’s brain waves may reveal which movies they like and even predict which movies will do well at the box office, reports LiveScience’s Rachael Rettner. In the study, researchers had 32 college students watch 18 movie trailers each; the students had electrodes placed on their scalps to measure their brain waves, a test known as electroencephalography or EEG. After they watched each trailer, the participants were asked to rate how much they liked the movie and how much they’d be willing to pay for a DVD of it. After viewing all 18 trailers, the participants were asked to rank the movies in order of preference.
The researchers then looked at the EEG data on certain brain waves, called beta and gamma waves. Results showed that the beta brain waves were linked with people’s rankings of the movies: The more beta wave brain activity there was as a participant watched a movie, the higher that individual ranked the movie.
The study is one of the first to show that “EEG measures are related to real-world outcomes and that these neural measures can significantly add to models predicting choice behavior,” the researchers, from Erasmus University in the Netherlands, wrote in a paper that will be published in the Journal of Marketing Research.