Touching the future
Alberto Gallace, Charles J. Spence · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2014
A lot of predictions have been made in the past about the role of touch in the future technological world. However, the majority of them ended up being unfulfilled. This often occurred because the researchers, scientists and philosophers who made them, did not fully consider the ways in which our brain processes and integrates information from touch and the other senses. There are certainly fields of research on touch that are at the moment clearly under-investigated and that might offer great potential in terms of rapid advances in the future. In particular, the study of touch in regions of them body outside the hands and the fingertips is likely to develop in the years to come. Similarly, the role of certain neurocognitive mechanisms of tactile processing in driving our social behavior, as well as in determining our body identity, are also topics that will likely see an increase of interest in the future. All of the advances that are increasingly made in the neuroscientific study of touch are likely to see a direct application in the emerging fields of virtual reality, marketing, and product design.