The Brave New World that Aldous Huxley describes in his novel of that title features the “feelies.” In 1932, the year of its publication, the films were becoming talkies. Feelies must have seemed like a logical, if creepy, extension of that. The book alludes to a movie at a local theater with a love scene on a bearskin rug, in which the feel of each bear’s hair is reproduced.

The sensors haven’t arrived yet. But people are working on them. In computer games and virtual reality (VR), two heirs to the role of cinema in light entertainment, practitioners of the discipline of haptics attempt to add a sense of touch to those of sight and hearing, to increase the illusion of immersion in a virtual world. . They hope that in the future, if you reach out to pluck an apple from a tree in such a…