Cant touch this4/10/2023 ![]() ![]() But according to proponents, some mix of devices that allow us to feel touch sensations in VR - haptic vests, gloves, armbands, helmets, shorts, or even shoes - will give rise to a powerful haptic epistemology capable of restoring balance to our mediated sensorium. While the “goggles and gloves” model of virtual reality has lingered in our cultural imagination since the 1980s, recent commercial VR hardware releases - like Meta’s Quest, Sony’s Playstation VR, and HTC’s Vive - have been more goggles than gloves: far more focused on graphical displays than on haptic interfaces. For the past 50 or so years, the dream of the haptics field has been that a newly virtualized touch could both complement and challenge the visuality of computer displays, restoring a missing dimension to our interactions with and through computers. Concerns about “ skin hunger ” have been pushed to the surface of our collective consciousness, but our existing digital interfaces don’t permit the simplest (though often most meaningful) forms of interpersonal social touch. ![]() In a recent survey conducted by the National Research Council, 78 percent of respondents indicated that they miss the ability to physically touch when interacting with people virtually 63 percent saw virtual reality as a means of compensating for the loss of physical interaction caused by the pandemic. The past two years of countless, contactless Zoom weddings, funerals, holidays, and hangouts have given a new urgency to an old dream: being able to make meaningful tangible contact through screens. ![]()
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