• The human sense of smell and touch are the last to join the digital age

• The human sense of touch is difficult to digitize because of modal complexity

•  The Haptics of Things network enables sharing touch sensations over the internet

Humankind is undeniably in the midst of the Information Age – a period marked by the digitization of information and the far-reaching impact of the internet. As information flows effortlessly among countries and cultures, it is easy to extrapolate current trends and anticipate the blossoming of virtual digital worlds with augmented reality and virtual reality. However, two human senses remain absent from this digital highway flow: olfactory and touch. 

The challenge is a practical one: researchers have largely solved the difficulties of digitizing optical and acoustic signals, whereas sensory and physical interactions require as-of-yet-to-be-invented “displays” (and we use that word not to mean a literal screen, but as some way to economically capture and present these signals to a user). Some readers may recall the ultimately unsuccessful historic attempts to display olfactory sensations with the late 1950s’ “Smell-o-Vision,” where rudimentary odors were pumped into theaters to match on-screen content. (For fun, read “A Brief History of Smell-o-Vision”) For both smell and the sense of touch, the idea of these sensations being part of a consumer film experience was mocked in The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) as a “Feel-o-Rama” (NSFW).

This blog will specifically focus on touch – in particular, haptics, which is the science and technology that replicates touch sensations through vibrations, force feedback, and other tactile stimuli. We will explore the challenges and opportunities it presents in the context of the digital age.

The Challenge with Haptics

The sense of smell has a daunting set of issues to tackle, but the sense of touch’s complexities reach even further. Humans perceive all of the senses passively, but unlike all the others, touch has an active mode. Physical contact creates touch sensations but also affects the object you’re touching. What you ultimately perceive is the interaction with the contact. 

This active sensing mode, together with the myriad of sensations that the skin can deliver to the brain (vibration, pressure, stretch and temperature, to name a few) bring a whole new level of complexity to the “display” of touch sensations. And we haven’t even addressed the issue of area versus point input: humans perceive sight and sound through two isolated points, respectively, whereas with the hands, humans create multiple contacts with an object, generating hundreds of touch signals in parallel and simultaneously.

The enormous complexity of sensory touch has an even stickier (pun intended!) issue: Researchers are only recently beginning to understand the effects that certain types of touch have on how the brain perceives the world, but also how touch affects the very mechanism of thought itself. A recent article suggests that the physical act of writing creates a richer set of sensory input over typing that, in turn, creates a richer memory imprint for later recall. 

The Impact of Haptics 

So, how you physically interact with something affects how you think about it. Even when you’re not interacting with something, there is a whole class of touch sensations that encompass self-sensing modalities, like proprioception, that also remain untapped in today’s digital information flow. This brings to mind an early 1980’s film called “Altered States” where the characters explored dimensions of the mind by taking drugs and entering a supposed “sensory deprivation chamber,” eliminating all touch sensations. Well, sorry, but the body has inherent self-sensing mechanisms in the ear and in the very stretching of the skin that make truly feeling nothing nearly impossible. (But it surely makes for good drama!) In essence, the sensation of touch and thinking may be inseparable, truly pushing the frontier of what can and cannot be shared in the digital world.

What does all this complexity mean for the future of touch sensations in the digital age? As daunting as it seems, we think it all starts with a framework to exchange simple touch sensations on the internet: We’re calling it the “Haptics of Things” or “HoT” (h-oh-tee) network, and it is the underlying mechanism for the exchange of vibration messages in vring. Our app, vring leverages haptics to unlock a wide range of use cases, from secret messaging to communicating in busy or loud environments. 

We hope to continue to grow the HoT to eventually include other sensations like pressure and temperature, depending on how sophisticated the devices that display touch sensations become – but that’s a topic for another day. Until then, we hope you follow along with our journey to expand the very frontier of human sensory experience in the digital age.