Featured Articles

From Touch To Feel: Innovating Sense-Based Experiences

Multi-touch interfaces like Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft’s Surface and Perceptive Pixel’s Multi-Touch Wall have enabled a wave of new applications, products, services and consumer experiences- they are today’s market standards. By pushing beyond these interfaces as well as forthcoming variations of tactile feedback and gestural interfaces into a more affective domain, the emergence of what we might call ‘feelback’ systems will provide transformative opportunities for innovation in a variety of computing, communication and interaction contexts.

Touch before feel

Before considering what a ‘feelback’ system might be it is important to locate where Touch Sensation has put us so far. Touch Sensation refers to the tactile, finger-to-screen input or output modality that is now a common feature on many devices. Apple’s iPhone and CNN’s Magic Wall stand out as two of the more notable (read: popular/known) touch devices; but, as Bill Buxton points out, both are products of long innovation cycles. The Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research has compiled an impressive list of innovations beginning with the keyboard and including the 1972 Plato IV, the 1981 Tactile Array Sensor for Robotics, and the 1992 Simon from IBM and Bell South- whose design DNA have enabled dudes to make their phones fart and Wolf Blitzer to physically shape the news world. But Touch Sensation is more than technology.

It’s natural. An interactive modality based on relatively simple and commonly understood gestures. Touch removes a layer of the ‘machine’- it brings users closer to the experience of being in control. The ability to touch, drag, pinch, stir, spin, zoom, direct or manipulate an action without using a button, mouse, stylus, pen or other device enables a new, seemingly more direct and almost ‘magical’ form of control.  We like this. To touch with our fingers brings us into a more intimate relationship with our content, information and experiences.

It’s performative. Touch introduces a new set of skills to discover, develop, master and demonstrate to both the world and to others. Like a gamer playing on the cutting edge of information and world affairs by shaping, shaving and sculpting events, TV audiences are captivated by Wolf Blitzer demonstrating his mastery over the interface technology of CNN’s Magic Wall. In similar fashion, the iPhone enables mastery and performance in more intimate ways; scrolling for a contact, pinching and gesturing to scale photos and zooming in on maps have evolved into new and complex forms of social display.

It’s a disruptive, competitive differentiator. Among consumers, touch screen devices elicit greater perceived value. The iPhone oozes a cool factor that makes even the latest non-touch devices seem old fashioned, and Apple has capitalized on defining this new standard of experience and expectation. To the average consumer, touch is a recognizable innovation that demonstrates ‘progress’ and exemplifies a higher level of sophistication on the part of brands that employ it.

Part 2 coming soon- Steps towards feeling