George Rebane

Nevada City’s efforts to attract Google’s attention for field testing its new broadband program is making news in the big city.  The New York Times described our community hullabaloo held Saturday a week ago.  Russ has more about that on NC Media Watch.

In a side discussion with an old friend and internet academic, Dr Larry Press, he suggested that perhaps we should include the ability to implement haptic applications from the remoteness of Nevada County.  That would be novel and perhaps also attract a different genre of businesses to our community.  Haptics is the techie word for (remote) touch capability.  In other words, someone sitting in Grass Valley could be doing surgery on a patient in Redwood City or Bucharest.  Technically it’s all possible if we have sufficient bandwidth.

Years ago the haptic applications I worked on involved simple force-feedback to handheld manipulators that worked with equipment located on the seabed five miles down.  Imagine today’s technology that is able to transmit the coarseness of a surface to your fingertip in a special glove over a broadband link.

Anyway, Chip Carman and John Paul who head up our 95959google proposal have set up a new website, www.95959google.com, please visit it to keep updated on what’s happening on this community project.