The Next Big Sensation?

Touch surfaces make things much cheaper and more convenient for the manufacturer. Resistance is futile. Although, to be fair, with great design the opportunity for cool exists.

The big problem is that no matter how much you gussy it up, touching a flat computer screen feels like touching a flat computer screen. It can have as many flashing, beeping pictures of buttons as you like, but there's something about the human brain that doesn't trust those little icons. We mash them again and again, our primal lizard ape brains not believing those icons are actually responding to us -- because it feels all wrong.

Now we're trying to solve that. The multibillion-dollar goal is for smart devices to make our fingers feel as if they are actually working with the good old three-dimensional physical objects that evolution has taught us to trust.

That's why competitors to the iPhone are focusing on the main thing it has yet to offer. Advertising directors for the BlackBerry Storm are doing their level best, this holiday season, to make sure you know that their product is not just touchy, but touchy-feely. Hit its screen and you get a hint of a tactile response. This means a lot.

We've been trained to savor the feel of physical objects. Pull the lever of a slot machine and you get a ker-chunk as rewarding as with the lever of a Winchester. Artists obsess over the difference in snap between squirrel-hair brushes and sable-hair brushes. A fisherman knows the feel of his favorite rod as precisely as the golfer knows her putter. No chef would ever put up with a badly balanced knife blade.

Real or Imagined?

Touch can be spoofed. Cold spaghetti and the power of suggestion can make blindfolded people believe they're being covered with worms, and you can convince visitors to a "haunted house" that they're feeling eyeballs when they're actually touching peeled grapes. That's basic to the science and magic of touch, says Allison Okamura, director of the Haptics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

"Haptics," as it is called, refers to the ability of people to sense the world around us through touch. Haptics is to touch as optics is to sight. "Haptics technology" refers to our ability to capture and transmit the vast array of information we get from feeling our three-dimensional world, the way cameras and screens feed information to our eyes.

Okamura's operation is part of the Hopkins robotics lab, a handsome space strewn with marvelously engaging objects. Not the least of these are the human skulls -- what's up with those?

Okamura takes command of an experimental surgical robot that could help operate on your eyes. "This eliminates tremor," she says, maneuvering the robot's business end over the eye socket of one of those skulls. "If I shake, it holds me steady. I can force it to make me move very slowly and deliberately, so it makes me extremely accurate. You can go in and puncture vessels in the eye. For macular degeneration. People like to inject declotting drugs and things like that directly into the vein. In the retina."

Pause.

"Everybody has a different thing that freaks them out. Apparently this is yours," she says.

Robot-assisted surgery has been around for some time, but the surgeon usually stares at a screen to see where the scalpel is going. The way to achieve superhuman steady hands, Okamura explains, is by engaging touch. Computer-mediated feedback makes one's hands feel as if they are maneuvering through goo. Or, say, if you want to peel a very thin membrane off the back of the retina but you don't want to puncture the retina itself. Virtual feedback can guide the surgeon's hands.