“Metaverse Skin”: Living and Feeling the Virtual World?

The metaverse is a space, which would combine elements of augmented reality and virtual reality to allow us to live in a “digital universe”. Although it is still merely theoretical, it seems that giants like Facebook and Google understand it as the next great technological step of humanity. Mark Zuckerberg has described it as “a space where you can do almost anything you can imagine: meeting with friends and family, working, learning, playing, shopping, creating, as well as completely new categories that don't really fit our way of thinking. about computers or telephones today ”.

Thus, thanks to the advertising power of one of the largest companies on the planet, the metaverse has been in the eyes of all publications, despite being hardly a possibility.

However, although the "digital universe" could remain in promise, the truth is that some of the technologies that are being developed in parallel to this are quite interesting. Among them are, for example, a skin that would help us feel the virtual world .

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Re: Skin, what does it consist of?

Developed by Meta company and Carnegie Mellon University, Re: Skin is a skin that combines a plastic with a thickness of less than three millimeters adorned with magnetic particles and artificial intelligence to create a sensation of touch. Thus, when the skin touches a material, the plastic deforms and alters the magnetic field of the inserted particles. This change goes through a printed circuit board, which communicates the alteration in the magnetic field as a force to artificial intelligence. In this way, the robots could "feel" what the skin touches.

The skin can identify touches as light as 0.1 newtons (the weight of an average apple is equivalent to 1 Newton) and can monitor 400 changes per second.

For now, the technology is planned to be used to improve robots that handle touch-sensitive materials, such as fruits. However, it is expected to have a greater number of applications, from robotic hands to shoes that allow tracking how far dogs walk.

However, perhaps the coolest (albeit still theoretical) application of this technology would be its use in the metaverse. Abhinav Gupta, research manager at Meta AI Research said that Re: Skin could help give a "physical and haptic feel to the metaverse of virtual reality ."

Lastly, the low price of the Re: Skin is worth mentioning. 100 units can be produced for less than $ 6, so it could be a fairly accessible technology in the future.