CompArts Week 14
Hello both of my followers :)
Found this week’s lecture super interesting — it was the topic of “Haptics, Touch and Visions”. I also started auditing “Introduction to Virtual Realities” this week (a few weeks behind, because I didn’t realise we could “audit”? I still don’t really know what it means, but I’m taking that class now…so…brilliant!) so this made it even more relevant.
Technology-wise, we were mostly exploring the Haptics and recording/simulating touch, and the Vision part in all of this was mostly the relation between touch and vision — being the strongest of our senses when confirming to us what is real. I have here in my notes:
“Sight and touch converge — giving us different aspects of what we consider to be reality. One confirms the other.”
I’d not really thought about that before, but I really do believe it to be correct. Something that Mattia was talking about was how Vision is a metaphor for knowledge — “You see, therefore you know”. Again, not really thought about it, but there’s SO many phrases out there that describe this utterly unbreakable notion that to see something is to know it. And what do you do if you’re in disbelief? You reach out to touch it. “Do me eyes deceive me?”
Super interesting. I’m more annoyed that I hadn’t clocked it to be honest! It’s so obvious when you think about it so, thank you for pointing that out!
Something that was spoken about when we arrived at the area of Synthesising Touch was the notion that in order to make these things encodable, they have to be isolated, and the different elements broken down into subgroups. The sense of pressure, temperature, moisture, vibration…they all exist separately, and by breaking them down into subcategories you have more success at rebuilding.
This is actually something that my partner Steph and I have been talking about, but in relation to smell. We both got COVID a couple of weeks after lockdown started, so would’ve been early April (2020). I was quite lucky and I got a very minor case, but she had a much stronger case that came with loss of Smell.
Everything started to smell like “cleaning product” — another thing she used to describe it was “a chemical fire” which I find very visceral. Over the period of the next few months, different “stands” of smells started coming back — I think the first one was Citrus. One day she was cleaning her hands with our Aesop bathroom hand-wash — a smell she knows very well — and after months of smelling nothing or that cleaning product smell, she could smell JUST the Orange. So she hadn’t regained her smell, but one small branch of it?! It made us realise that smell must be composed of these strands, these subcategories, and upon receiving a mixture of these our brain performs various calculations and combines them. Much like in Creative Coding when we assemble Turquoise out of 62 parts Red, 224 parts Green, and 208 parts Blue. Or, apparently, Haptics.
All in all this was really interesting, especially as before last Tuesday all I knew about Haptics was that my old iPhone 7 Home Button that didn’t press simulated a button push (which still blows my mind how well that was done) and that this was called a “Haptic”.
Stay tuned for more Really Obvious Things that Oli Didn’t Quite Realise this time next week, on Medium.
