Speaker 1 Welcome to the Deep Dive, your shortcut to being well informed. Today we’re plunging into, well, a really fascinating challenge. How do we truly get a handle on scientific concepts that are just inherently invisible? You know, things like the quantum world or what’s happening inside a single cell. So much of science is just beyond what we can easily see or hear.

Speaker 2 It really is. And it makes you wonder, what if we could feel it instead?

Speaker 1 Exactly. What if we could use another sense?

Speaker 2 For so long, we’ve relied almost totally on sight, maybe sound, but could touch unlock something new, a different way to understand?

Speaker 1 Well, that’s precisely what this deep dive is all about.

Speaker 2 We’re looking at midair haptics, how touchless tech can transform science communication. It’s based on this really interesting research paper.

Speaker 1 Right. From Hodges and colleagues in Frontiers in Computer Science back in 2020.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And they really explore how this specific technology, midair haptics, might just be a game changer for making science clearer.

Speaker 1 So our mission today really is to unpack how this sense of touch, specifically this midair haptics, could be the—

Speaker 2 Key, the key to making these really complex, invisible scientific ideas, well, tangible.

Speaker 1 Tangible, engaging, maybe even, dare I say, enjoyable for you, the learner.

Speaker 2 Right. This is sort of your shortcut to understanding the honestly surprising potential of feeling the unseen.

Speaker 1 It does sound almost counterintuitive, feeling something that isn’t there in the usual sense.

Speaker 2 It does. And this potential is so important because, let’s be honest, science communication can feel like a real uphill battle sometimes.

Speaker 1 Definitely.

Speaker 2 There’s this persistent challenge, a kind of historical disconnect, sometimes even real fear between the public and, you know, new scientific advancements. It’s a barrier.

Speaker 1 Oh, absolutely. When you say public fear of science, my mind jumps straight to things like the Large Hadron Collider. Remember the launch in 2008?

Speaker 2 Vaguely. Yeah. The black hole fears.

Speaker 1 Exactly. People were genuinely worried it could, like, destroy the Earth. It sounds wild now, but the fear was real.

Speaker 2 That’s a powerful example.

Speaker 1 Or think about the Chernobyl syndrome. That term kind of captures that deep lasting public anxiety and mistrust after the disaster. It arguably had health effects just from the fear itself.

Speaker 2 Wow. Yeah. Perception shaping reality.

Speaker 1 And you can go way back to the Scopes Monkey Trial that really highlighted the conflict between, say, religion and science over teaching evolution.

Speaker 2 Right. And that teaching ban lasted until what, 1968?

Speaker 1 Yeah. It shows that this isn’t just a small gap, it can be a huge chasm sometimes.

Speaker 2 Precisely. And traditional science teaching often just focuses on the facts. Right. The cognitive knowledge, memorization.

Speaker 1 Get the grade, move on.

Speaker 2 Exactly. But effective science communication, the kind this paper is interested in, aims for something deeper. Personal responses.

Speaker 1 Okay, what does that mean, personal responses?

Speaker 2 Well, the paper uses this model called AEIOU. It stands for Awareness, Enjoyment, Interest, Opinion Forming, and Understanding.

Speaker 1 A, E, I, O, U. Okay.

Speaker 2 Think of it like steps. You can’t really get to true understanding if you haven’t first become aware, then hopefully found some enjoyment or interest, maybe formed an opinion.

Speaker 1 So it’s about sparking curiosity, not just delivering facts.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Building a more personal connection.

Speaker 1 Which brings us back to the core problem. How do you communicate stuff that’s literally invisible? Atomic structures, electromagnetic radiation.

Speaker 2 Things we only experience indirectly, like as light or heat, but can’t perceive directly. How do you show that?

Speaker 1 Well, science communicators have tools. Right. But they have limits.

Speaker 2 They do. Take physical models. They’re great—things like the cosmic sculpture, that 3D map of the cosmic microwave background.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, I’ve seen pictures of that. Or the Tactile Universe project.

Speaker 2 Right. 3D printed galaxies for kids with visual impairments. Really valuable. They offer lots of detail, static, tactile shapes.

Speaker 1 But static is the key word there.

Speaker 2 Exactly. They can’t really convey dynamic processes. How things change, move, interact, or what’s happening inside something. They’re like snapshots.

Speaker 1 Okay, so physical models are limited for dynamic stuff. What about digital tools like AR?

Speaker 2 Helps. There are projects like Hobit, which uses AR for teaching light interferometry. It overlays digital info onto physical objects, which is useful. It’s often more affordable, safer than complex live experiments. But you’re still mostly seeing an overlay. You don’t get that physical feeling of interaction or motion.

Speaker 1 Okay, and then there’s traditional haptics, force feedback things.

Speaker 2 Right. Devices like the Phantom joystick. People use that for instruction—feeling viruses at nanoscale, or how an atomic force microscope works.

Speaker 1 Or simpler things like the Hapkit.

Speaker 2 Yeah. For teaching dynamics. They can convey forces or maybe structural properties, but often you’re interacting through a tool like a probe or a stylus.

Speaker 1 Not directly feeling the concept itself?

Speaker 2 Not usually, no. And they still kind of struggle to represent complex dynamic processes smoothly.

Speaker 1 So we’ve got this disconnect, these invisible concepts and tools that help but aren’t perfect, especially for dynamics, which sets the stage perfectly.

Speaker 2 What’s the next step? Is there something they could really break through?

Speaker 1 Well, this is where it gets, I think, really exciting. Enter midair haptics, feeling the unseen.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 It’s a genuinely novel approach. This tech generates tactile sensations touched directly on your skin, but in midair.

Speaker 2 No gloves, no controllers, nothing.

Speaker 1 No wearables, no attachments. Just your hand in the air, and suddenly you feel something.

Speaker 2 Okay, how on earth does that work? It sounds like science fiction.

Speaker 1 It kind of does, but it’s real. Basically, it uses a grid, like a panel of tiny ultrasonic transducers. Think of them as miniature speakers, but emitting sound waves way above our hearing range.

Speaker 2 Ultrasound. Right.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And they use clever processing. It’s called a phased array, to focus these sound waves together at a very specific point in space.

Speaker 2 Like focusing light with a lens, but with sound.

Speaker 1 Precisely. This focused sound creates a tiny pocket of air pressure, acoustic radiation pressure right on your skin, on your palm, your fingertips.

Speaker 2 You feel a little push.

Speaker 1 You feel a push? Yeah, but the real trick is they modulate it. They pulse that focal point on and off really quickly.

Speaker 2 At frequencies we can feel?

Speaker 1 Yes, at frequencies that stimulate the mechanoreceptors in our skin. Roughly between 5 and 400 hertz. So you perceive it as a localized vibration, a texture, a distinct touch sensation.

Speaker 2 Wow. And there’s a company commercializing this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Ultraleap. They used to be called Ultra Haptics. They’re one of the main players making this tech available.

Speaker 2 Okay, so it creates touch out of thin air using focused ultrasound. But how good is it? Like, how precise can that touch be?

Speaker 1 It’s actually surprisingly precise. Studies show users can tell the difference between focal points that are similar, say 5cm apart, even if the vibration frequency is the same.

Speaker 2 And even closer if they’re different?

Speaker 1 Yeah, down to about 3 cm if the frequencies differ and you get better. With a little practice, the average error in locating the sensation is only about 8.5 millimeters.

Speaker 2 That’s pretty accurate for just feeling air.

Speaker 1 It is. And it’s really good at creating illusions of movement.

Speaker 2 On a sign, making it look like they’re chasing each other.

Speaker 1 Exactly. That principle. But with touch, by rapidly shifting where that focal point is, they can make you feel something moving across your hand or swirling or even colliding.

Speaker 2 Ah, so that’s how they simulate dynamics.

Speaker 1 Right. And the more points they use in the sequence and the longer the duration, the smoother and more convincing that feeling of motion becomes.

Speaker 2 So you could feel lines, circles, animations.

Speaker 1 Lines, circles, complex animations, even basic 3D geometric shapes, all by controlling where and when those little touch points appear on your skin.

Speaker 2 That’s pretty cool. And you mentioned this has been used in VR and art.

Speaker 1 It has, yeah, for things like virtual buttons or adding texture to virtual objects or in interactive art installations.

Speaker 2 But this study, the Hodges one, is the first time someone really looked systematically at using it for science communication.

Speaker 1 That’s the key point. It’s the first proper empirical research, asking, could this specific technology help us communicate science better?

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Speaker 1 It really makes you think. If we can now genuinely feel things that were previously imperceptible, a swirling quantum probability, the structure inside a cell, maybe the forces in a distant nebula.

Speaker 2 Yeah. How might that actually change our perception of reality itself? What new ways of understanding open up when the universe can be felt, not just visualized or described?

Speaker 1 And how could that shape the next generation? Kids growing up able to connect with scientific knowledge through a sense—touch—that we’re only just starting to really leverage in this way.

Speaker 2 What kind of explorers, what kind of thinkers might that create?

Speaker 1 That is definitely something profound to mull—

Speaker 2 Over until our next deep dive.