Haptic, from the Greek αφή (Haphe), means pertaining to the sense of touch (or possibly from the Greek word haptesthai meaning “contact” or “touch”). Haptic controllers allow the user to feel weight, shape, texture, and other tactile qualities of objects in a digital image. It's what the iPhone's interface promises, the Nintendo Wii uses and what Samsung's only-available-in-China-so-far competitor to the iPhone is. It's the new way of interacting with tech and it's coming to a mobile near you soon: tech experts predict 40% of new mobiles will have touch (haptic) screens by 2012.
Time says of our newly tactile tech:
"It's the realization of the core metaphor of modern consumer computing, dating back to the Macintosh or arguably to the first computer mouse, introduced in 1968. The idea was that we would all pretend that abstract digital information is physically real, that we could see it and manipulate it according to physical laws. The iPhone takes the graphical-user interface--the GUI, in the parlance, pronounced "gooey"--a step further and makes it a tactile user interface. You're viewing a little world where data are objects, and instead of just pressing your nose up against the glass, you can reach in and pinch and touch those bits and bytes with your hands. The word is made flesh. Any realer and it would be Tron."
Pictured is MIT's I/O brush from giladlotan's Flickr stream. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special "ink" they just picked up from their immediate environment.
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