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Adrian David Cheok, the first person to hug a chicken via the Internet, has some advice for creative engineers trying to make their own mark on history. Rule one: Embrace your idiosyncrasies. Rule two: Get your hands dirty. Rule three: Don’t worry about the critics.
His 2005 Poultry Internet project showcased all these strategies. Cheok, then an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the National University of Singapore, was fascinated by the notion of transmitting not just multimedia but also sensations over the Internet. He decided to start with haptics, the technology of touch, by building a system that would let pet owners send their lonely animals a pat during a busy workday at the office.
Growing up in Adelaide, Australia, Cheok had often played with the chickens kept by his grandfather, so he decided to focus on poultry (rule one). He built haptic jackets for the chickens himself (rule two), embedding them with vibrating elements. Tinkering taught him just how difficult it is to produce a gentle, humanlike touch. “The system develops as you build it,” Cheok says. “I see research as iterative—you’re learning from what you’re making.”
The chicken’s jacket was connected wirelessly to the Internet, and its coop was rigged with a webcam. Then, in his office, Cheok patted a chicken doll that had touch-sensitive sensors, and the squeeze was transmitted to the live bird while he watched. The chicken had been hugged.
Cheok says some of his colleagues weren’t impressed by this unorthodox project: “There were some of the faculty who thought, this is not engineering, let alone research,” he says. But he carried on (rule three) and found appreciative audiences at both international conferences and in the coop. In an experiment with a flock of chickens, 70 percent chose to enter the room where their little jackets would be put on them instead of a room where they’d be left alone.
