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 manner by way of a burning constructing. You discover what you got here for and escape. Exterior, it’s so chilly you begin to shiver, whereas your palms and toes go numb.
However you then take away your headset and all of it stops. You simply completed an extremely practical coaching train. None of these sensations have been brought on by modifications in your environment, though they felt actual. As an alternative, chemical compounds fastidiously chosen to imitate completely different emotions have been pumped onto your pores and skin.
Such stimulants have lengthy been helpful for understanding contact, probably the most complicated 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 circumstances. Now, Jasmine Lu and her colleagues on the College of Chicago are utilizing this data to create chemically induced sensations, to make digital environments astonishingly practical.

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 variety of sensations – sizzling or chilly, numb or tingly – on demand. Its makes use of might embody creating intensely practical digital worlds for players to discover or for coaching firefighters. However will we ever have the ability to totally replicate the expertise of touching one thing actual, and what may we lose if we are able to’t?…