Touch, lag, and the haptic uncanny

Verisimilitude doesn’t happen only in space, but in time as well. That’s the takeaway from this Microsoft Research video about recent work in the effect of reducing the lag time of touch-interactive interfaces. The effect of lag, which becomes especially noticeable in large interfaces, is a familiar one—and it has its analogues in the physical world; I think of those magnet play-tables in pediatric waiting rooms, with toy ships and cars that kids can pilot around by sliding magnetized tokens across the underside of the play surface. There’s something irreducibly uncanny about magnets, no matter how familiar we are with their effects—a general principle worth remembering when experimenting with tangible interfaces modeling real-world effects.

At metaLAB, we’re interested in experimenting with exploring tangible digital objects not as surrogates for things, but as interrogations of the properties of the real—as arguments about the embodied dialectics of physical and perceptual properties. It’s worth noting that it’s not a matter of eliminating lag, but of finding where network lags begin to sympathize with our own. —video via Snarkmarket.