Haptics: 6 Reasons Touch is Important

Posted; April 8, 2019

Touch is our least understood and least researched sense. Yet it's fundamental to how you interact with the world around you, wellbeing, and communication. Here's six reasons why we should all pay more attention to our sense of touch.

Tactile sensations, vision, and proprioception (the sense of the position of our bodies in space) all combine to create our sense of body ownership or presence. When this is disrupted we become disorientated, losing our sense of what is our body and what isn’t.

Reaching out to touch things to assure ourselves of their reality is also a fundamental human behaviour. As Descartes put it, “Of all our senses, touch is the one considered least deceptive and the most secure.”

The complex interplay of sensations such as hot, cold, hard, soft, pain, itching, and so on is central to understanding and interacting with the world. Tactile sensations warn us, allow us to discriminate between objects, and (unlike vision) provide a 360° field of perception.

When I reach for a cup of coffee on my desk, it’s sight that directs my hand towards the cup. But it’s haptic feedback (a mix of tactile sensations and proprioception) that allows me to grip the cup and pick it up. I do all of this without having to think about it – it’s completely intuitive.

It’s extremely rare to lose your sense of touch, but the few people who have (such as Ian Waterman, whose amazing story you can read here) describe it as being effectively paralyzed. It takes months or years for them to learn how to manipulate objects using solely their sense of sight.

Humans are social animals, and research shows touch builds emotional connection and is fundamental to social communication. Touch is essential to early childhood development and several studies (including one featuring Ultraleap's haptic technology) have shown that people can communicate emotions solely through touch.

Touch receptors in your fingertips are capable of detecting a skin displacement of just 0.00001mm. Or, to put it another way, you can detect an object the size of a molecule (albeit a very large one).

Haptic technology integrates touch into computer interfaces and virtual worlds.

We’re used to simple haptic devices such as the vibrate function on a mobile phone. Today, though, there are far more sophisticated systems – including the ultrasound devices developed by Ultraleap, which precisely focuses ultrasound waves to create tactile sensations in mid-air.

In many ways, haptics is the missing piece of the puzzle in our interactions with technology. In VR, haptics deepens immersion. The same is true for spatial computing more generally.

In automotive, it makes interaction using gesture control systems easier. And in digital marketing and advertising, it increases engagement and brand recall.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Across the board, haptics breaks down the barriers between people and technology, creating rich digital worlds that feel human. And it's powering the next wave of human potential.