Multi-Sensory Human Bond Communication

The three articles in this special section examine the topic of human bond communication (HBC). Information and communications technologies have progressed rapidly in this millennium for people to communicate and exchange information using multimedia including speech, text, image, and video, and the same mode of communication has extended to the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine and machine-to-human communication. However, the ability to integrate the other three sensory features, namely, olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), and tactile (touch) in information transfer and replication to deliver Star-Wars-like “being there” and “beyond being there” experience is still far from reality, and presents the next holy grail of immersive experiences, which we call human bond communication (HBC). HBC is a novel concept that incorporates all five sensory sources of information from sensing to digitization to transmission and replication at the receiver to allow more expressive, engaging, realistic, and holistic information transfer between humans, and in some cases between humans and machines (M2H) or IoT. Besides its utility in applications such as virtual reality, virtual presence, and gaming, the medical field could immensely benefit from such applications. New types of social networking applications could emerge based on HBC technology; present-day social platforms may undergo radical transformation.