When Aldous Huxley described the ‘Feelies’ of his 1930s satire Brave New World he envisaged a world in which touch would be exploited by the technology of the future as much as vision. How wrong he was.
Of all the senses, touch as been somewhat neglected as a human means of interacting with machines.
Haptics – which could lead to people interacting with virtual objects using a sense of touch or feel – means to change all that. Labs around the world are now racing to close the gap while the first commercial applications are hitting the market.
For the first time people will be actually be able to have a virtual feel of some of the images that are placed before them.
Keeping in touch
A leading advocate of haptics is Russian scientist Doctor Ivan Poupyrev, now a senior researcher at Disney Research Labs in Pittsburgh. He claims this area is going to be “huge”, particularly for hand held devices.