Mediated Touch

Imagine standing in your living room, yet feeling the embrace of a loved one who’s thousands of kilometers away. Or picture shaking hands with a colleague in a virtual meeting: feeling the pressure, the warmth, the presence. These aren’t scenes from science fiction anymore. With advancements in communication technology, we’re exploring how to bring physical sensations like touch into digital spaces.

Touch is central to how we connect. From a reassuring pat on the shoulder to the warmth of holding hands, physical contact builds emotional closeness. But when we’re apart (traveling, working remotely, or communicating virtually) this vital sense is often missing. So, what if we could feel touch through technology?

In recent years, the field of mediated touch has grown significantly. Researchers are developing systems that simulate tactile experiences through virtual reality (VR), haptic devices, and social robots. These tools aim to replicate or represent touch remotely, helping people maintain emotional connections at a distance.

Touch, however, is uniquely complex. It is the first sense we develop in utero and one of our most powerful tools for emotional regulation. But it’s also deeply contextual. A hug, a tap, or a caress may carry vastly different meanings depending on the mood, cultural context, or relationship. This makes touch both potent and ambiguous when translated into digital media.

Current haptic technologies like wearable devices or actuated surfaces struggle to replicate the nuances of real human touch. While we can mimic pressure or vibration, capturing warmth, intention, and emotional tone remains a challenge. This raises deeper questions in human-computer interaction and affective science: Should we aim to faithfully recreate human touch? Or should we instead focus on conveying its emotional effect through other sensory channels, like sound, visuals, or symbolic gestures?

At CeTi, Prof. Riccardo Bassoli, Prof. Merle Fairhurst and her team explore these questions by investigating how touch can be communicated across distances in meaningful ways. Their interdisciplinary research bridges neuroscience, psychology, and technology to study both the limitations and opportunities of remote touch. They ask not just how we touch, but why we touch and how to translate that meaning through machines.

Final thoughts

Do we need to perfectly mimic the sensation of touch to feel emotionally connected, or can technology find new ways to express closeness? Might the future of remote interaction rely less on realism and more on resonance, creating experiences that feel emotionally right, even if they’re not physically exact?

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Could you imagine a world where digital touch becomes part of everyday life?

To learn more about our work at CeTi, visit https://ceti.one/ and stay tuned for more research insights on the science and future of social connection.