“The lack of touch breaks the suspension of disbelief in VR,” says Kuchenbecker. “That’s what current virtual reality is like: you can’t feel anything.” “Most of us have experienced a temporary loss of touch – perhaps when your leg falls asleep, or when we have local anesthetic for a dental procedure,” says Katherine Kuchenbecker, an associate professor of computer science, mechanical engineering and applied mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania, who is recognized as one of the leading authorities on haptics, or the science of touch. From walking to sitting to sleeping, you are constantly using your sense of touch to adjust your motions so that you complete the task you’re working on, whether that’s swiping your tablet screen to read this story, adjusting the chair you’re sitting on or picking up a mug to take a sip of coffee.

Touch is the most underrated of all of our senses. Even though she could see the match, she couldn’t feel where the match was touching each of her fingers or when it was touching the matchbox, and that same simple task took 25 seconds. Then he numbed her thumb, index finger and middle finger. In one, he filmed a woman picking up a match and lighting it in just a few seconds. In a series of experiments in the 1980s, Roland Johansson, a professor of physiology at Sweden’s University of Umea, demonstrated just how important touch is.