Is it possible that the absence of tactile art is a mere accident of history? The historian Constance Classen reminds us that in the eighteenth century touching the objects in proto-museums—cabinets of curiosities and amateur collections—was invited and expected and even, in a way, compulsory. “When the underkeeper of the Ashmolean in 1760 tried to prevent a museum visitor from handling artifacts he was accused of incivility,” she writes, in “The Book of Touch,” an anthology of writings on the tactile. The current reign of the optical museum—where all the objects are shut away, even ones that demand to be touched to be understood at all, like scientific or musical instruments—is, Classen shows, in “The Deepest Sense,” a cultural history of touch, a recent one, due to “the association of touch with irrationality and primitivism.” The museumgoer who touched was a woman or a child; the patriarchs shut things up in cases and then looked at them imprisoned.

Of course, there may be more insurance than episteme in this change: when ten people a week come to see your Greek bust, letting them caress it is one thing; when ten thousand come, it is something else. And, indeed, one of the ways in which the ten still distinguish themselves from the ten thousand is that they are allowed to touch the objects: seeing and handling art objects out of their frames and cases is one of the perks of becoming an art professional. (Art pros will often, perhaps unconsciously, talk or even brag about handling a famous thing—“I saw ‘The Scream’ without its frame and held it up!” “The Jasper Johns flashlight was actually in my grasp and I got a sense of its magic!”—to assert their authority.)

In the absence of art, touch turns easily to entertainment. The high-water mark of the touch world can be found at the haptics conferences that fill the calendar of hapticians everywhere, most notably the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ annual Haptics Symposium, which this spring was held at a hotel in downtown Philadelphia, on a perfect April weekend. Since the upper hall of the hotel is eerily like a high-school gym, one can get the impression of being at a science fair to which only really smart kids can submit projects. It helps the effect that, haptics engineers being professionally unpretentious, they customarily refer to their innovations as “incredibly cool,” as in “Did you see the locating device they developed at M.I.T.? It’s incredibly cool!” An I.E.E.E. haptics fair is exactly what Ben Franklin would have dreamed of for American science—practical-minded, eccentric, and, as with bifocals, solving problems that one was not entirely aware were problems until an inventor found a solution to them.

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The crowd includes the usual engineering types—Midwesterners, Asian-Americans, Asians from Asia—and, in a historically male-dominated discipline, a surprising number of women. There are also numerous special visitors from Apple and Google, extremely anxious about saying too much about what, exactly, they’re looking for, the wrong word likely both to spill the beans to the competition and to boost undue speculation about somebody’s startup. The air crackles with the distinctive combination of altruism and entrepreneurialism which governs the tech world.

Many and cool are the devices on offer: a “Novel Vibrotactile Feedback Assisted Mid Air Writing device”; a “New Wearable Fingertip Haptic Interface for the Rendering of Virtual Shapes and Surface Features.” And here is the Animotus, designed by Adam Spiers, of Yale, and intended “to communicate proximity and heading to navigational targets”; it’s a small white two-story cube that sits innocently in your hand, willfully changing shape as—Wi-Fi’d or Bluetoothed to a G.P.S. system—it nudges and pushes you in the right direction down streets and around corners and up alleys, leading you with silent efficiency to whatever destination you have entered. It is like having a tiny guide dog in the center of your hand, nudging your palm with his tongue. (Eventually, it might be connected to an obstacle-spotter, so that it actually could replace those guide dogs for the blind.) Another new haptic device allows for long-distance Swedish massage; created by a team of Mexican engineers, it allows the masseuse to simply wave her hands over a motion sensor, which reproduces the precise sensitivities of her touch on the back of a patient lying on a pinpoint-tuned motion-sensor pad. Swedish masseuses would no longer have to leave Sweden; they could stay in Stockholm and e-mail massages anywhere in the world.

The attendees like to assure you, and one another, that it is only in the past few years that they have really put the happy in haptics. The haptics devices that most of us are familiar with are the simple ones that make a controller vibrate when the assassin is killed in Assassin’s Creed or the defenseman crunches a forward in NHL 16. The new generation of haptics-makers tend to be a little embarrassed by these primitive devices, which they have been known to refer to as “joy buzzers” or even “whoopee cushions,” in comparison with the new generation of haptics. A standard trope in an I.E.E.E. demo is to place the old trembly technology beside the new, sleek and persuasive full-range touch illusion.

William Provancher, formerly a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah, now runs a startup called Tactical Haptics, and had the hit demo of the conference. He can create astonishing touch illusions using simple gaming controls. With the HTC Vive—those virtual-reality goggles—he conjures a vast, empty white skin of space, stretching out to every horizon. Life-size zombies come at you from zombie-style holes that expand within the white sheets, like the resurrected dead in Signorelli’s painting of the Last Judgment. Armed only with a bow and arrow—though what you are actually clutching is a controller with a trigger, shaped more or less like a gas-pump nozzle—you can feel the tension on your virtual bow as you release the arrow, and then the flutter of the arrow and the thunk of the ground trembling when the arrow strikes an onrushing zombie and he falls.

Heather Culbertson, now a postdoc at Stanford, worked at Penn in its famous GRASP lab—the acronym stands for General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception—and she has returned to Philadelphia to show off her own invention. It is a haptic system that can create the illusion of a hundred distinct textures when you hold it and drag it against a neutral surface. Metal mesh, metal shelving, sandpaper, linoleum, bubble wrap, cardboard, coffee filter, painted brick: holding a pen-shaped utensil in your right hand, you touch the desired texture’s name and then drag the utensil across a countertop, say, and in your fingers you feel exactly the sensation that you would feel if the tool were being dragged across the material you specified. You feel wood; you feel brick; you feel paper. More astonishing, the virtual textures change in feeling, as real ones do, depending on the force and speed with which you move the tool across them.

The Queen of Haptics is Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, the brilliant Stanford-trained engineer who oversees the haptics group at the GRASP lab and supervised Culbertson’s work. The daughter of a developmental psychologist—and, one is not surprised to learn, a member of the Stanford volleyball team that twice won N.C.A.A. titles—she recognizes the gratifyingly large number of women engineers in haptics. (It was Kuchenbecker who trained Culbertson, then passed her on to her own supervisor, the formidable Allison Okamura, at Stanford.) She is understandably reluctant to say that women study feelings better because they have more of them than men, but then she more or less says it. “We have a long tradition of women as team leaders in haptics,” she volunteers—the founder of the GRASP lab is a legendary roboticist named Ruzena Bajcsy—“and I think it’s fair to say that women are drawn to areas of engineering with obvious human interface. Places where what you’re doing obviously reaches people, touches them, you might say.”

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She likes the potential of haptic devices to serve both pros and amateurs. Heather Culbertson’s tool allows designers to choose fabrics at a distance and someone searching for clothes online to feel the linen of a summer shirt while sitting at her computer. “What Heather and I did was to take a haptic camera—a touch-based camera—and a swatch of material, and record ten seconds of interaction, dragging the tool back and forth, fast and then slow, light and then heavy,” she explains. “But the key to creating a compelling illusion that you’re touching a real object is that the sensations you feel match all the motions that you make. So we cut that recording up into tiny pieces, fifty milliseconds or a hundred milliseconds of touch, so that we got the minute details right—exactly what you felt on canvas when you moved fast but pushed lightly, and the next time, when you were going slower but pushing harder.” The illusion of texture arises when the vibration pattern is played back. The sensing stylus you hold, which resembles a very fat ballpoint pen with a cable attached to its rump, transmits patterned vibrations to your fingers. In a way, it’s something like the needle in the groove of an old-fashioned vinyl album, only it plays back into your fingers rather than into your ears. “When you change how hard you are pressing or how fast you are moving, the spectrum of the vibration waveform changes to match the spectral changes we measured during the original data recording,” Kuchenbecker says. “It’s like recording a certain natural sound, like a waterfall, and then being able to generate a synthetic sound that sounds the same but goes on forever and never repeats, so it’s not just a looped recording. The trick is that we constantly change the properties of the waveform to match the exploration conditions, like adjusting how fast the waterfall seems to be flowing. And it creates a fluid, moving, three-dimensional illusion of texture.” Choose your texture, drag the tool across nothing, and you feel touch plus time, which is all that texture is.