The blind will be able to feel a computer image. With the introduction of a third sense to the virtual world, human interaction with computers takes on a whole new dimension. After all, until now, humans used only their eyes and ears in sampling the world of TV and computers. Keyboard and mouse are just input devices, not ways of experiencing output. What we learn with our hands is what separates us from other animals.
Humans get very large amounts of information about the physical world by touching things.
It's fast and subliminal. Quite a bit of the human cortex is devoted to touch, says Mandayam Srinivasan, director of MIT's Lab for Human and Machine Haptics. That is precious real estate, so you can how important touch is to us. If, for instance, the computer screen shows a ball sitting inside a box, you can move your thimbled finger forward through empty space until the pointer on the screen encounters the virtual object and the thimble suddenly feels resistance. The computer ball, after all, is just a string of geometry data plotted on x, y and z axes.