I find Bret Victor’s article and follow up interesting. It is true that, as technology has moved forward, we have abandoned the “physical” and turned, instead, to the glass screen (as seen not just in tablet laptops, but on the fact that phones have shifted from having a physical keyboard to being just one big screen). Bret Victor suggests some sort of haptic approach that enables our hands to feel what’s happening in a more meaningful way than just touching glass. How does this work?

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word “haptic” is haptic feedback —sometimes called “HD Rumble” and, at times, mixed with accelerometers and gyroscopes— that video game consoles like the Nintendo Switch have implemented to enhance the user’s feeling of touch while playing. A particular example that comes to mind is in Nintendo’s game, 1-2 Switch, a party game meant to serve as a technology demonstration for the console and its controllers. One of the mini-games included in the collection shows a picture of a cylinder on-screen while asking how many balls are inside it. Then, the players hold one of the controllers and tilt it side to side, using the vibrations the controller produces to guess how many balls are sliding around inside the cylinder. To a player, it is just a game, but the technology behind sensitive vibrations, the positioning of the controller relative to previous positions, and the speed at which the player is moving it.

Although Bret Victor’s vision of the future goes way beyond haptic feedback, it may be the case that, as Pictures Under Glass technology may be a transition stage to something better, there may also be an awkward transitory stage of Pictures Under Glass But With High Quality Haptic Feedback that may, or may not, evolve into something more advanced that enables us to do more than just rely on haptic feedback.

The question of what this new technology will look like, however, is unknown. 8 years after the article was written, cell phones are more and more screen; their processors and systems are more potent that ever; their touch screens more precise now than they were just half a decade ago. And yet, are these upgrades? Nothing has actually “changed.” They are still computers with touch screens, just better now that they are more precise and powerful. Even now, development seems to have stalled, with companies like Huawei and Apple releasing different models of the same phone with a “Pro” addendum whose only add-ons are a better camera and more processing power. The giants of technology seem to be stuck in a war of who can release the phone with the better camera instead of who can innovate the most.

At the end of the day, it’s all about what sells the most.