I am but a babe, exploring the world for the first time. Wearing a computerized glove, I reach forward in pursuit of a little toy basketball. A robotic arm and hand do the same, mimicking my every move. Slowly I grasp the object, lift it, swing my arm over, and let go, dropping the ball— ploink!—into a plastic cup.

I am very, very proud of myself. Applause erupts from the computer in front of me. But this is no American applause here in San Francisco, this is British applause. The robotic hand and ball are actually in London—I’ve just bossed around some hardware clear across the Atlantic.

My tool in this feat was a Shadow Hand, perhaps the most complex robotic hand on Earth. On each of its fingertips is a sensor that allows the robot to feel, a sensation that’s piped across the world into my haptic glove. If I merely brush the Shadow Hand against a ball, I get a subtle sensation. When I grip the ball, the sensation grows more intense. Amazingly, there’s very little latency between my movement and the robot’s, even though the system is running through a 4G phone sitting on the table beside me.

With the glove on my hand, I am both there in London and not there. I can feel the ball, but also not feel it, because what I’m getting is a reproduction of sensation. The gentle proddings are kind of like having a bunch of pixies dancing on each fingertip.

Welcome to the eerie and improbable frontier of “telerobotics”: the act of piloting machines from afar. Surgery and bomb-disposal robots already have simple haptics for operators—mostly to telegraph collisions—but they pale in comparison to this rich, elaborate sense of robotic touch.

Shadow Robot Company Shadow Robot Company

This new system is made of components from three different groups, each with their own area of research expertise: the glove with haptics was designed by HaptX, the robotic hand came from Shadow Robot Company, in England, outfitted with fingertips from SynTouch. The project is funded by ANA Holdings, the parent company of All Nippon Airways. (They’re in the business of connecting people, after all. But this is certainly a nontraditional approach.)

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Robots

First, that Shadow Hand. It looks a bit like the Terminator’s hand when he rips off his skin, only less metallic. It’s meant to replicate the major movements of the human hand, and it does so with hypnotic accuracy. “But there are some subtle details—how the palm curls, the way the base of the thumb moves around, the way skin covers joints—that we haven't yet managed to get into the robot design,” says Rich Walker, managing director of Shadow Robot Company. “One of the really interesting benefits of this sort of project is we can see what is necessary to be able to do things, and what is just nice to have.”

On each of the hand’s fingertips is a dome dotted with 24 electrodes, on top of which is a skin of silicon. When SynTouch injects saline, it creates a kind of sea between the skin and the electrodes. Put pressure on the fingertip and the electrodes detect the change in resistance in the saline, giving the hand the power to sense touch in fine detail.

When I pull on the glove, I’m thrust into a perspective that’s disorienting at first, made up of two camera feeds on side-by-side screens. One of them is zoomed out and pointed at the arm; the other is sitting on the table and looking closely at the objects I’m manipulating. That’s not how you or I see the world—we’re used to looking directly down at our hands. But you get used to watching the zoomed-out camera to maneuver the hand right up to an object, then switching to the table-level camera when you’ve almost made contact.