Haptics: Touching the Untouchable. Embracing haptics in gaming and medicine
- Adam Kadmani
- Feb 24
- 7 min read
Touching the Untouchable: Haptics
Close your eyes and imagine feeling a rock in your hand—yet there’s no rock, and your hand is completely empty. This is the essence of haptics. It’s a technology that lets us touch what isn’t physically there. We often think of graphics and sound as central in immersive experiences, the moment you can feel a texture, a bump, or a pulse in the digital space, your brain stops asking, “Is this real?” and starts believing it.
Haptics can be a simple “vibrate alert” on your phone, or it can be a new language spoken through touch. Every tap, buzz, or force you feel from your device is actually very carefully orchestrated to tell you something: a friend is calling, your car senses danger, or your game character is hurt. But the real magic of haptics goes far beyond these common cues—it lies in the deep sensory illusions engineers and researchers create, bringing digital objects to life for your sense of touch.
In this article you will experience the knowledge of how haptics translates into two different contexts: I) one in the virtual reality and gaming and the other II) in medicine.
I) The Core Technology
1. Actuators and Motors
At the heart of most consumer devices are small motors, like eccentric rotating mass (ERM) motors or linear resonant actuators (LRAs), that convert electrical signals into vibrations. These vibrations can be fine-tuned so you can feel a buzzing text notification or the simulated recoil of a virtual weapon. For instance, PlayStation's DualSense controller demonstrates this precision, allowing gamers to feel nuanced textures like sand or water resistance through advanced haptic feedback.
2. Force Feedback
Going a step further, force-feedback systems can push back against you. Think of a steering wheel tugging under your hands as you push a sharp corner in a driving simulator. Tesla's automotive systems exemplify this, using haptic alerts to signal lane departures or autonomous driving mode changes, transforming how drivers interact with their vehicles. Furthermore, embedded seat haptics are becoming very popular for the automotive sector and also simulator gaming, such as SensIt!’s Metahaptics for simulator car racing.
3. Emerging Mid-Air and Surface Haptics
Engineers have developed ways to create a sense of touch without wearing gloves or holding a controller—using ultrasonic waves or specially tuned vibrations on surfaces. You can place your hand in mid-air and feeling a floating button or a virtual raindrop striking your palm, all controlled by beams of sound. This is where haptics surpasses simple vibrations, no longer just shaking in your hands, but rather building a rich tactile environment in your space.
4. Wearable Neural Interfaces
The future of haptics is tightly connected with neuroscience. Some wearables bypass mechanical vibrations altogether, sending electrical signals to nerves in your skin or muscles, simulating textures, weight, and force. These neural interfaces work through micro-electrodes that deliver precise electrical stimulation:
• Different pulse frequencies can mimic surface textures
• Varying signal amplitudes suggest object weight
• Specific nerve stimulations create temperature sensations
These precise electrical signals allow for extraordinary sensory reproduction, where an object's texture becomes tangibly real, even when no physical object or force exists.
The Richness of Haptic Experiences
• Virtual Reality
VR headsets already transport you visually into other worlds, but your sense of touch is what actually brings your body to feel in those worlds. Ropes can tug at your arms in a climbing simulator, or the handle of a virtual sword can vibrate subtly in your hand, simulating weight or unique effects. Carefully balancing this with audio and video amplifies your brain’s sense that “I’m truly here.”
• Spatial Computing
As we move from flat screens to AR/VR and mixed reality, our computers “know” the 3D space we occupy. Haptics adds the tactile dimension to this digital-physical blend. Instead of just pointing your fingertip at a floating holographic button, you actually feel a “click” in mid-air, and possibly whether than button is hot or cold, and heavy or light.
• Training & Accessibility
Surgeons can practice incisions on virtual patients, feeling the resistance of different tissue layers, and athletes can refine their technique through affirmative feedback, e.g. training your golf swing. Moreover, for individuals who can’t rely on sight or hearing, haptics provides a new dimension for understanding your environment channels, offering intuitive signals through touch to navigate interfaces and environments.
• New Forms of Art & Entertainment
Exhibits can become interactive, where you feel the brushstrokes of a digital painting or the flutter of butterfly wings on your hand. Musicians could craft “touchable” concerts where each note resonates not just in your ears but across your palms and body. These expansions of creativity can redefine the connection between the artist and audience.
Why Haptics Will Shape Our Future
1. Presence
Digital experiences are no longer just visuals and soundscapes. Adding touch does a lot to convince our brains that “this is real”. Many uncharted immersive applications in entertainment, therapy, education, and beyond emerge.
2. Blurring Physical and Virtual Boundaries
As hardware (headsets, glasses, neural wearables) become smaller and more powerful, the barrier between our physical reality and the digital overlay will dissolve. Haptics ensures we navigate this merge through natural, instinctive touch interactions.
3. Democratizing Creation
Tools that combine AR with haptic feedback will let novices “feel” design elements as they create them—think of sculpting a something digitally with your hands, refining its texture and shape by sensing it in real time. It’s an intuitive, tactile creation process that idealizes real-world craftsmanship.
4. Accessibility & Inclusivity
The same technology that pushes immersion for gaming can empower people of all abilities. From guiding those with visual impairments in unfamiliar environments to helping others better sense sign-language cues, haptics allows for inclusive design and a new way of expressing oneself.
A Glimpse Ahead
Haptics is the missing piece that can transform a virtual experience into something your mind and body can fully believe. However, the path to truly good haptics is fraught with complex technological challenges.
The fundamental difficulty lies in mapping the extraordinary complexity of human touch. Our skin contains over 1,000 nerve receptors per square centimeter (~17,000 in one palm), each responding differently to pressure, temperature, texture, and movement. Recreating this intricate sensory landscape is a monumental engineering challenge. As Mark Zuckerberg recently and quite candidly stated in the Huge Conversation podcast: „Haptics is hard“.
Some technological hurdles include:
• Achieving rich, multi-modal tactile feedback
• Creating precise, low-latency stimulation that feels right
• Developing universal standards and devices for effective haptic communication
Despite these challenges, we're incrementally nearing truly immersive, consumer-ready haptics. In the ‘Metaverse’, we’ve seen attempts at making digital social interaction more natural by having avatars, body tracking and even expressive faces. A great possibility arises when a user is able to shake another’s hand, or hug their loved ones from afar. New developments in haptics systems and neuroscience will lead to these more natural interactions. In the near future, human-computer platforms will process the world around you, keep up with your senses and movements, and provide the right haptic feedback for the right moment.
TL;DR
• Haptics is about tricking your sense of touch, enabling you to feel textures, weight, and forces that don’t physically exist;
• The tech spans simple vibration motors to advanced ultrasonic and electrical stimulation; • As we enter an era of spatial computing, where digital content co-exists with the physical world, haptics provides the immersive glue that makes those digital interactions genuinely intuitive;
• Wearable neural interfaces and mid-air haptics promise to free us from bulky controllers and let us seamlessly feel virtual objects—even when nothing’s actually there;
• The future of haptics will affect entertainment, training, accessibility, and social interaction by engaging our most primal, immediate sense: touch.
II) Medical and Healthcare Applications of Haptics
Haptic technology already finds crucial uses in medicine and robotics. “Force feedback” allows physicians to feel subtle variations during a procedure, whether robotic-assisted or not, helping to minimize tissue stress and improve overall precision. This same principle extends to medical training, where the tactile sensations of real surgical conditions can be replicated. By actively “feeling” a simulated environment, physicians can better internalize these sensations and apply them in real procedures.
Developing and refining haptic feedback also promises to expand virtual healthcare. For example, a doctor could “feel” a patient’s tumor remotely by pairing advanced haptic interfaces with robotic devices. Beyond surgical applications, haptics shows potential in rehabilitation and telemedicine. Studies suggest the central nervous system can reorganize after injury, opening the door for adaptive recovery through technology. In one example, Chen et al. developed a virtual reality system combined with a brain-computer interface to support gentle hand rehabilitation, transforming a passive process into an active one.
Patients demonstrated better motivation and engagement— critical for success—while virtual tasks like a billiards game helped reinforce motor skills. As interest grows, many companies are targeting or incorporating haptics for precise robotic systems, better training simulators, and more intuitive patient care.
Companies Pioneering Haptics in Healthcare
- 3D Systems Corporation – Known for 3D printing, they also develop haptic solutions for medical training and simulation, focusing on surgical procedures.
- Haption – Offers high-performance haptic devices for medical and dental simulations, training practitioners for complex tasks.
- Immersion Corporation – Recognized for broad haptic applications, they also provide feedback solutions for medical devices and training systems.
- Ultraleap Holdings Ltd. – Formerly Leap Motion, this company has pioneered mid-air haptic feedback, which can be utilized for medical training and simulation without requiring physical controllers.
- Neocis – Specializes in robotic guidance for dental surgery, using precise haptic feedback to enhance surgical accuracy.
- Fundamental Surgery – Develops AI-driven platforms that integrate haptics and VR for realistic surgical simulations.
- Psyonic – Focuses on advanced bionic prosthetics that deliver tactile feedback, helping users regain a more natural sense of touch.
- Texas Instruments Incorporated – Supplies essential haptic driver technology widely used in medical devices to achieve tactile feedback.
Final Thoughts
We often underestimate how much “realness” comes from the sense of touch. As haptics evolves, it will continue to transform how we interact with digital worlds—whether by helping surgeons feel subtle changes during a procedure from miles away or by immersing us more deeply into virtual realities.
It’s clear that haptics will remain a “missing piece” in bridging the physical and digital, offering truly intuitive interfaces that go beyond what our eyes and ears can perceive.
Haptics will continue to evolve giving us sensations, feeling and sense of our interconnectedness to realities, sometimes giving the senses that it is more than what our eyes and ears can percieve. With technology evolving this will be the part where our actions dictates the direction we want it to develop. The challenges ahead remain into how to preserve the human in such a way that this advances to technology are ever exciting and brining impact.
Written by Adam Kadmani(I) and Elisaveta Lachina(II)
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