Istituto Marangoni • the School of Design

The Sense of Touch

Paradoxically, the more tactile screens, and immersive, intangible experiences take over every aspect of everyday life, the more the grip on the surrounding reality loosens. This is the heart of The Sense of Touch project with which Istituto Marangoni • the School of Design rethinks the possibilities of touch and its meaning in everyday life. It does so starting from the new TouchDIVER technology developed by Weart, which allows tactile experiences to be transferred remotely and applied to virtual and augmented reality. Users can experience touch in a new way, whether it is by feeling the texture of a virtual object or sensing the heat of a fire in an image, or even recalling the sensation of a hug from a distant person.

In collaboration with e-Novia, the students of the Master in Product & Furniture Design have tried to incorporate TouchDIVER in nine different products with the aim of exploring new interpretations of the experience of users both in the virtual and the real world: the proposals go from adding a tactile sensation to synthetic visualizations to incorporating distributed functionality through “augmented proxemics” in the use of objects.