Our Five Senses: Touch, Taste, Sight, Smell, and Hearing. eMedia today provides access and interaction through two of the five senses, but even then in only a surrogate manner. Touch, Taste and Smell aren’t possible today over the internet and very limited tactile or motion based interface devices provide access to touch in local gaming environments.

Two of the senses, Touch and Smell, provide a key difference between reading online and reading printed matter.  There is certain comfort and relationship that develops between us and a book or magazine with its thick, thin, rough or smooth pages to turn. Electronic reading devices attempt to mimic this, but the actual sense of touch is still lacking.  Books, particularly older ones, often carry with them an odor of authenticity electronic media devices cannot provide.  Remember also, the smell of freshly mimeographed school assignments and test papers?  Our sense of Smell can quickly transport our mental state back in time or across geographical divides affecting our wholistic interpretation of the matter at hand.

Recent inventions in the gaming world with Wii devices and Kinect controllers strive to get us more physcially involved and immersed in the digital world.  Yet, they don’t really provide any tactile sense of Touch as we really experience it in our daily lives.  The motion is there, but the innate sense of interaction is, somehow, still lacking.  Touch pads and pen based input devices like Wacom tablets try to give artists a more tactile sense of creation in artistic media.  But I find them no substitute for the real thing; putting pen or pencil to paper and drawing directly.  With a Wacom tablet my hand is in one place and my eyes are in another.  They don’t connect so the interactive circuit is disjoint.

What are we, as a society, missing now as the vast majority of our new creative ideas are logged solely in electronic media? What risks does this present to us?