[Excerpts from Fast Company]

Disney Research has come up with a new technology so advanced your sensitive nerves will detect a “smooth tactile motion, akin to what we feel when someone drags a finger across our skin.” It’s all about taking the art of sensory feedback from games and movies to a whole new level of user experience.  …

The tech consists of a “low resolution grid of inexpensive vibrating actuators,” which are essentially the same as the tiny buzzers that inhabit your phone but in this case they’re controlled much more precisely and are distributed across the body–from the back to the palm right down to the sole of the foot, so in some implementations Disney foresees the tech being built into clothing. The researchers have built up clever vibrator actuation algorithms, based on research into “psychophysical modeling of tactile illusions” (excitingly named “cutaneous rabbit illusion,” “funneling illusion” and so on) which tap into the way your nervous system works. The upshot is that when they send the right signals to the vibrators they can generate sensations even on parts of your body where there’s no vibrator and which are precise enough that they can control the movements of where you sense an actuator, how fast it moves and how intensely it “strokes” you.

Generating such real-feeling sensations in a person could be used in all sorts of fields from medicine to gaming. But you can imagine that the tech will definitely find a home in the entertainment business: How intense would your 3-D movie-going experience be if you felt a falling sensation when a James Bond leaps from a plane, or a creepy hand on your neck at the right moment in a horror movie? …