The news about VR touch is becoming a torrent of verbosity. We’re now talking about full body haptics, stable haptics, room-scale haptics and “much more”.

So what is this really all about, you ask sweetly from your bunker? Essentially it’s transferring an equivalent sense of touch to a VR object, at this point. This is another sensory interface, much like creating media for sight and sound.

The inevitable first frontier for haptic tech is of course gaming. The commercial buzz is unmistakeable and getting louder. This is big, and getting bigger on a daily basis. Haptics in some form are even coming to PlayStation controllers. Predictably enough, the theme is immersion, as though gamers weren’t immersed by definition.

(It’ll be interesting to see if lazy game developers and marketers do anything about making haptic games more reliable and less infuriating than current games. Crashes, no-saves, etc. are the usual fodder