In my Spring semester of last year, I took a class called “Touch” that opened my eyes not only to the primacy of touch, but also to our consistent ignorance of the primacy of touch. Our tactile sensory system is the first to develop in the womb and is arguably the last to deteriorate as we get older. It is also the only reciprocal sense – we can only touch something if it touches us – providing us with a truly connective interface to interact with the diverse environments around us. The sense of touch is also extremely vital for normal cognitive and social development. Yet, prototypes of future technological interfaces reduce the full range of interaction that touch affords us or eliminate it altogether. The future vision for AR/XR technologies seems to be doing away with the tactile. Pictures-Under-Glass, the moniker Victor aptly coins and uses in this week’s readings, technologies already offer us limited tactile feedback that only our fingertips enjoy. We now see the future of AR/XR interfaces, such as headsets utilizing eye movement tracking systems, heading toward a direction where the visual is prioritized. Our rich haptic system is left to atrophy in the process.
It is indeed worrying that we might reach a time when kids struggle to use a pen or open lids. In attempting to connect to the world via modern-day interfaces, it seems like we are disconnecting from it in important ways. There must have been interfaces that we could have envisioned that integrate all of our varied sensory systems, had we invested the time to make that a priority. Victor’s rant and his follow-up article were both written in 2011. 13 years later, his call to invest in research that centers the full range of human capabilities in the design of technological interfaces seems to have gone unanswered. We have yet to make our capabilities a priority in design, but that could change if we collectively dare to choose a different way of envisioning tomorrow’s technologies.