eweakin raises an interesting point in his comment about physical touch. It's such an foundational part of our personal relationships. I'm thinking about all the times when a very subtle touch spoke so much to me and yet it's so hard to replicate with technology.

 
Once I was at dinner with my wife, Kristin, and another couple. I unknowingly started steering the conversation to a topic that was a very sensitive one for our friends. Before I could say very much, however, Kristin touched my arm and I knew what it meant immediately. Stop talking.

I use this example because these subtle touches are easy to underestimate, versus the Xbox controller that shakes when someone is shooting at you. Think for a moment how different it is when someone says "How are you doing?" over the phone versus when they're looking you straight in the face, with their hand on your shoulder.

It's not like technologists haven't been trying though. There's a field devoted to the sense of touch called Haptics. Many of the projects I've seen have used Haptics to help give tactile feedback to the user to enable a general sense of touch in a vitrual environment. This is helpful for remote surgery and activities where you want to feel a sense of weight, pressure, and surface texture.

I'm more interested in the innovations that enable these powerful and subtle touches and I don't think it necessitates an actual physical touch. Humans are pretty good at associating things. My son is a year old and has about two words in his vocabulary. But when I come home from work and trigger the motion sensor in the driveway, the little guy hears the sound, drops the object that he's currently destroying and says "dada". Wouldn't it be interesting if we could associate the same emotional value to a sound or visual cue...without it being annoying.


I'm no expert in this area, but I've seen some related projects. For example, in the mainstream, Microsoft has the feature in MSN Messenger called the "nudge". It doesn't actually physically touch you, but shakes the program's window. I'm not sure what emotional value we're supposed to associate with a nudge beyond being an annoying virtual doorbell (ding dong! Are you there?). But I guess that the real challenge here isn't it?   Associating something meaningful (and positive, presumably) to a haptic sensation can be difficult.



So as I'm thinking this through, I'm imagining two interesting directions to go with this. First, the technology could physically touch you: vibration, shock, bump, whatever, to represent a physical touch from someone else. Second, the technology could use audio or visual cues to represent some emotional meaning. In either case you would need to use the system long enough to train your brain to understand the meaning, like my son learned what the ding-dong sound meant. For example, LumiTouch is a research project [paper-pdf] by some students at the MIT Media Lab that uses photo frames to provide this "ambiant-awareness". The photo frame on your desk would glow to represent that the other person was thinking of you.

I can imagine my phone having a customizble vibration profile that represented a "touch" with associated meaning, like perhaps... Stop talking.

Flickr photo by chuckp.