Well, for instance, what is commonly referred to as "touch" is actually a whole bundle of senses. There's the actual sensation of pressure, but also texture, temperature, surface finish, the physical position of your various body parts, your sense of balance, etc etc.
No, but points for a solid attempt. Senses are input (to the body), not output. Glove controllers are just output via movement, just like keyboards and touchscreens.
True, part of what makes them cool is that your proprioception more or less agrees with the virtual hand that you see in your headset, but that's just window dressing. The computer has no way to control that.
I'm no biology expert but had to study some of this for my robotics degree not so long ago.
"Sight"
split into rods for brightness sensitivity, and cones, each of which is deicated to one out of red, green, and blue. green is wider gamut of color than the others because there is a lot of green in nature. These sensors are fully independant of each other for the most part, although there is minor overlap between cones which is what we call other colors (yellow etc)
"Taste"
Again split into different specialised papillae sensors. I dont remember so well, but its something like foliate for sour sensing, fungiform for salty, and vallate for bitter/poison. There is also sweet I dont remember the name, and some argue for umami
"Touch"
There are an ungodly number of very distinct senses that go into touch. From more abstract ones like pain, heat/cold, moisture (not evenly distributed around body, for example have to touch things to lips to distinguish cold from wet), proprioception for joints (arguably an independant sense for each joint, or at least each "kind" of joint, because the biological mechanism is different for ball joints to saddle joints etc as well as specialised proprioception for eyeballs, tongue etc)
Then in actual touch touch there is Ruffini corpuscles sensing skin stretching and slippage of objects past the skin
Merkel discs, which senses pressure applied to the skin and low frequency vibration
Meissner's corpuscles, which sense vibrations in middle range. They are very sensitive and allow very slight sensing of tiny impulses such as picking up an insect's wing
Pacinian corpuscle sense extremely fast vibration which among other things allow the distinction between "rough" and "smooth" surfaces (by mechanical movement causing vibration)
There are also free nerve endings sensing stuff like itching and bruising.
Hair foillicles also sense movement and stretching of the hair they are attached too, which provides more touch data. Incidentally this mechanism is also used for balance and hearing via really complicated interactions of tiny hairs in the ear.
"Smell"
Smell is fiendishly complex, it actually is more akin to the way antibodies in the body are made in the sense it consists of thousands (and millions) of specialised sensors made to "fit" and attach to individual compounds, so there are almost limitless individual senses of smell
There is also a whole lot of internal sensor data for things like breathing (you know when you are short of breath), digestion you know when you are full, or when you are craving one of a number of things sweet salty etc), bladder control.
This is mostly off the top of my head and i'm certain i'm misremembering some of the subtlties and a whole bunch more senses both obscure and immediately recognisable ones to any owner of a human body
This is super interesting, and I appreciate the level of detail and thought that went into your response. Some I'm willing to accept, like hot/cold being distinct from pressure being distinct from pain. (Spinal cord injury, for instance, can impair pressure perception in a particular part of the body without affecting hot/cold. And lumping joint pain in with "touch" is just silly.)
On the other hand, in the context of the discussion, it's hard to support the argument that you can count each colour channel separately just because the biological mechanics differ. You can't actually triple the amount of human-perceptable information by going from a monochrome to full colour display.
The point remains that we've plucked the low-hanging fruit when it comes to high-bandwidth human senses (or meta-senses if you insist on being pedantic). No one will buy a PUI (pain user interface).
absolubtely! sight is an amazingly high-bandwidth sense, as is hearing.
Other types of interfaces do exist, for example ive worked with vibration motor arrays placed on the skin for various purposes such as assisting in guiding the arm of a patient to target a specific point (vibrate on side closest to target) etc. We also worked with pads of electrical patches that pass small currents through the skin to produce a distinct sensation, like pain but barely at the threshold of being noticable. These were used for first responders, placed along the side of the torso underneath the clothes with flat profile, allowing them to have handsfree silent communication with low bandwidth. Something like "up up left left" being pre-agreed to mean leave the structure now etc. Another fun one I wanted to mention is in-mouth joysticks controlled with the tongue for quadreplegic patients to allow them to move a wheelchair or robot arm to regain some small independance (might seem like it would be uselessly hard to achieve anything with an arm controlled that way but the emotional impact of independance can't be understated for such people, even a simple task can be very meaningful)
They won't be as good as screens or audio unfortunately. But they can exist. Even braille screens and keyboards exist as a nice product and are reasonably high bandwidth.
> On the other hand, in the context of the discussion, it's hard to support the argument that you can count each colour channel separately just because the biological mechanics differ. You can't actually triple the amount of human-perceptable information by going from a monochrome to full colour display.
You absolutely LOSE perceptible information when you lose one of then channels, like in color blindness.
