Soon Your Tech Will Talk to You Through Your Skin
By Clive Thompson
12.22.14 5:30 am
When Thomas Ella gets a text message on his
smartphone, he can sometimes tell what it says without reading it. Instead, he
feels it: An app called Mumble! “plays” the text as a pattern of vibrations,
syllable by syllable, using higher-intensity vibrations when a message has
exclamation points or capitalizations. After a few weeks of using the app, Ella
developed a sort of tactile ESP, an ability to recognize texts as coming from
particular friends and to distinguish a significant message that needs a reply from
an “LOL” that doesn’t. “It’s cool,” he says, “to have a reason not to pull out
my phone.”
Haptic technologies have begun to flourish
recently—tools that buzz, vibrate, or otherwise “communicate information
through people’s skin,” as haptics pioneer Karon MacLean, of the University of
British Columbia, puts it. Automakers like General Motors are producing
drivers’ seats that vibrate in the direction of an impending collision. Apple’s
new smartwatch can deliver taps of different intensity to your wrist to
communicate everything from a new message to GPS directions. Haptics, it
appears, is the next way we’ll interact with information—and each other.
It’s not hard to see why designers are looking for a
new conduit. Our eyes and ears, the dominant modes for the digital world, are
full to bursting. Devices bombard us with text alerts and audio bleeps. Your
skin, on the other hand, is an “underused channel,” says Raymond Kiefer, a
safety expert who helped design GM’s vibrating seats. “This is a way to cut through
the visual and auditory clutter.”
There’s a danger here, of course. Vibrations cut
through the white noise of today’s alert-o-sphere. But just as new freeway
lanes increase traffic, a new channel for alerts could quickly turn into an
attractive target for overuse—an exquisitely annoying form of overload.
Arguably we want app makers to reduce the number of pings we get.
That’s why, to me, the most interesting use of haptics
won’t be “hey, go check this out” alerts. It’ll be the potential to spawn a new
mode of communication. People are extremely good at distinguishing among many
different signals written on their skin. Google wearables designer Seungyon
Claire Lee tested what she called BuzzWear, a wristband that vibrated three
small buzzers in 24 different patterns. With 40 minutes of training, her
subjects were able to distinguish among them with 99 percent accuracy. In
another study, MacLean played patterns onto people’s fingertips via a
smartphone game—and found they could remember them weeks later. “It was like
learning new words, like learning verbal language,” MacLean says.
Crude buzzer patterns are likely to give way to more
granular, complex signals. Already, inexpensive conductive threads can deliver
tiny bursts of electricity. Lee envisions using them to stitch hundreds or
thousands of haptic pixels into clothing that could “draw” a picture onto your
skin: tactile illusion, as she puts it.
The alphabet of haptics could become the next emoji, a
way of supplementing our traditional language—email, text—with expressive
flourishes. It’ll be an intimate mode too, because fundamentally haptics is
about being touched. (Apple has suggested that its watch could let you feel a
loved one’s heartbeat in real time.) Powerful stuff, which is precisely why we
want to be careful with it. We spent centuries learning to write on paper. Now
we’ll learn to do it on skin.
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