How do you digitize touch? You may have played video games where the controller shakes and buzzes, heightening the effect of onscreen crashes. In fact, you can find that digital touch sensation — known as haptic technology — in devices from your smartwatch to your cellphone. But as engineer Katherine Kuchenbecker explains, the haptic possibilities don’t end with our entertainment and communication tools — haptics are now being used to “smarten” everything from virtual reality to robotics technology. Kuchenbecker, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, has even worked on haptics that can suggest textures as detailed as cotton or wood, using a technique she calls haptography — recording “how surfaces feel to touch with the same accuracy that we can capture them with a camera.” “Imagine you take a tool and you drag it back and forth over a piece of leather, or say, a rough piece of stone,” she says. “You can feel the tip of the tool bounce across the little bumps
