To start, attending to digital devices is said to preclude being present:

“You know you have crossed the river into Cyberland when the guy coming your way has his head buried in the hand-held screen. He will knock into you unless you get out of his way, and don’t expect an apology. It’s as if you aren’t there. Maybe you’re not.”

I’m very interested in language like this, because it’s a metaphor in the process of becoming a literalism. Today, saying that you’re not there because you’re looking at a device is metaphorical, but I think that the meaning of ‘being there’ is going to change to mean where you are engaged, no matter where its geographical location is in relation to you. “I’ll be right there!” he said as he plugged his brain into the internet. Moments later he was standing in the garden…

The article quotes a study that claims that the average adult spends 8.5 hours a day visually engaged with a screen. 24-hour days, split up by 8.5 hours of screen and 8 hours of sleep—the Screen Age really does deserve its own delineation. It’s a significant and unique period in human history.

And just like sleep, perhaps disturbingly so, people looking at screens can resemble dead people (or, more accurately, un-dead people):

…We have become digital zombies.

But I think the resemblance is entirely superficial. Sure, if you only go by appearances, an army of screen-starers is a frightening sight to imagine. But scratch the surface and you realize that screen-staring is a far cry from zombism. The social spaces we are constructing while we stare, the vast data stores we are integrating—these activities remind me of life. Teeming life. Our bodies may be sedentary, our eyes fixed on a single glowing rectangle, but what is going on is indisputably amazing. On the microscopic level there are billions of electrical fluctuations per moment, both in our brains and our machines, and they are actively correlating and adapting to each other. Patterns of thought are encoded in a vast network of micro-actions and reactions that span the planet. And what is it like for you when you stare at a computer or phone screen? You juggle complex, abstract symbolic information at speeds never before achieved by human brains, and you’re also inputting—emitting—hundreds of symbols with the precise motor skills of your fingers. You are recognizing pictures and signs, searching for things, finding them, figuring stuff out, adjusting your self image, and nurturing your dreams. There is no loss of dignity or life in this. But I admit that we all look like zombies while we do it, and I suppose that is pretty weird.

The article goes on to quote author Katherine Hayles, who says she thinks humans are in a state of symbiosis with their computers:

“If every computer were to crash tomorrow, it would be catastrophic,” she says. “Millions or billions of people would die. That’s the condition of being a symbiont.”

Let that sink in. At any moment a catastrophic event could fry our entire digital infrastructure in one fell swoop. Our civilization teeters on a house of cards as high as Mount Everest! To me this is the only reason the Screen Age should be frightening, but it’s very frightening indeed.

Turning now to sensation, Hayles mentions that touch and smell are suppressed by bipedalism:

“You could say when humans started to walk upright, we lost touch with the natural world. We lost an olfactory sense of the world, but obviously bipedalism paid big dividends.”

Note that bipedalism is associated with a loss of tactility, but it has also been correlated with enabling more complex manual dexterity. Maybe there is a general principle here that ambient tactile awareness is inversely correlated to prehension.

After a brief ensuing discussion of dualism and the advent of location-based services, we’re back to the gardens:

The difficulty, Harrison argues, is that we are losing something profoundly human, the capacity to connect deeply to our environments… “For the gardens to become fully visible in space, they require a temporal horizon that the age makes less and less room for.”

I like the point about a gardens’ time horizon. But it’s used to complain about the discomfort of our rushed lifestyle, which I would argue is separable from communication technology. The heads-buried-in-screens thing doesn’t really affect whether we have time for gardens.

An interesting footnote offered by Harrison is that the Czech playwright Karel Capek, who invented the word ‘robot,’ was a gardener.

Finally, this is the photo that accompanies the article:

(via Althouse)

Here’s the highlight video posted on the All Things Digital website:

For more, read the full press release.

UPDATE:
Engadget: Immersion demos new TouchSense multitouch, haptic keyboard at D7.
Gizmodo: Immersion’s new haptic touchscreen tech encourages corny iPhone romance.
Electricpig: Multitouch tactile keyboard demoed

(via Engadget)

A former teacher at a school for the blind and a professor from Tsukuba University of Technology have developed a cell phone that sends out vibrations representing Braille symbols to enable people with sight and hearing difficulties to communicate… When a caller pushes numbers on the keypad corresponding to Braille symbols, two terminals attached to the receiver’s phone vibrate at a specific rate to create a message.

Japanese Braille uses six dots to represent the Japanese syllabary. Using the numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8, on cell phones to represent these six dots, it’s possible to form Braille symbols. The developers are now working to make the devices that convert keypad information into vibrations smaller than their current size (16 centimeters by 10 centimeters). If vibration-based Braille is applied more widely, it may enable information to be “broadcast” to several blind people at once.

The idea of representing one bit of Braille with one cell phone key has a certain elegance, but I’m not sure how useful it would be. Readers of Braille are used to using their fingertips, not their entire palms. On the other hand, the article is so vague that I might not even be understanding what they’re up to.

(via Engadget)

The interviewer calls it a “genuinely remarkable technology.” My job right now is to develop vibrotactile applications for the phone in the video, so it makes me happy to see that this kind of thing is generating excitement!

Totally missing the point, Gizmodo asks, “Does anyone care?”, noting that users are already accustomed to the iPhone’s non-tactile keyboard, and that this particular haptic keyboard is buggy. Whatever; research clearly indicates that vibrotactile feedback for surface keyboards enhances interaction. Kudos to these folks at the University of Glasgow for beginning an open project on a popular platform to develop this much-needed software.

[via Boing Boing.]

UPDATE: Aformentioned friend notes that the bracelet is not, in fact, fashionable. My mistake!

The article also interviews Vincent Hayward of McGill University’s Center for Intelligent Machines who has been developing skin stretching techniques to simulate tactile stimuli normal to the contact area. I saw him present his “THMB” system at the Enactive conference in Montreal, and it looked damn cool. (“Looked” not “felt,” because again… no demo. Maybe I’ll make an appointment to walk over there one of these days and check it out.) It’s a MEMS, positioned on the device to be felt by the tip of the thumb (essentially the same place as Sony’s scroll wheel).

Speaking of which, I recently read about Sony’s own moble vibrotactile platform, which it calls the TouchEngine—an extremely thin vibration actuator made out of piezoelectric film. But it’s not for the thumbtip; it’s installed on the back of the device, and sits in contact with the user’s palm.