YOU open a door and it hits you – a flare of heat in your pores and skin. You brace your self to go inside, battling smoke and warmth. Flames flicker round you as you make your approach by means of a burning constructing. You discover what you got here for and escape. Exterior, it’s so chilly you begin to shiver, whereas your arms and toes go numb.
However then you definitely take away your headset and all of it stops. You simply completed an extremely sensible coaching train. None of these sensations had been brought on by adjustments in your environment, though they felt actual. As a substitute, chemical compounds fastidiously chosen to imitate totally different emotions had been pumped onto your pores and skin.
Such stimulants have lengthy been helpful for understanding contact, probably the most advanced of all human senses. Within the Nineties, research of capsaicin, an extract of chilli peppers, and menthol, present in peppermint, helped us pin down how our our bodies react to cold and warm situations. Now, Jasmine Lu and her colleagues on the College of Chicago are utilizing this information to create chemically induced sensations, to make digital environments astonishingly sensible.

In a expertise dubbed chemical haptics, they’ve constructed a wearable machine that, when positioned on the pores and skin, may cause the wearer to expertise a spread of sensations – scorching or chilly, numb or tingly – on demand. Its makes use of might embody creating intensely sensible digital worlds for avid gamers to discover or for coaching firefighters. However will we ever have the ability to absolutely replicate the expertise of touching one thing actual, and what may we lose if we are able to’t?…