Just when we thought we’d ticked off all the boxes on our basic senses, along comes a study from Queen Mary University of London that throws in a real curveball: ‘remote touch.’ This phenomenon is the ability to perceive an object buried within a granular material—like sand—without making any actual physical contact.
Our fingers, it seems, can pick up on incredibly subtle mechanical signals, generated as the particles around a hidden object shift or vibrate. It’s a discovery that turns our everyday understanding of touch upside down.
But wait—ahead of the curve, some animals already have this trick up their feathered sleeves. Shorebirds such as plovers probe the sand with their beaks to sniff out worms and invisible shellfish. Inspired by this, psychologist Elisabetta Versace and her team set out to see if humans have something similar lurking in their own toolkits. The answer? A resounding yes—and the results are surprisingly good.
In the first set of experiments, volunteers were tasked with identifying objects hidden beneath the sand using only their fingertips—without any visual, sound, or temperature hints to guide them. The results startled the researchers: participants accurately detected the object’s presence in nearly 70% of cases, sometimes through nearly three inches (about 7 centimeters) of sand. That kind of score is pretty hard to chalk up to sheer luck.
According to the scientists, the secret lies in the detection of tiny vibrations or pressure changes transmitted across the sand. The catch? These signals are so faint that they shouldn’t—at least according to classic tactile perception models—even make it past a millimeter. Yet, the volunteers seemed able to sense them much farther away, hinting at a perceptual mechanism that we’ve yet to fully understand.
But the story doesn’t stop with people. In a second experiment, the research team tried to teach a robot to pull off this same feat. Using a tactile sensor combined with a machine learning algorithm (specifically, an LSTM network), the device was trained to identify buried objects. It didn’t hit the same highs as the human participants—success rates hovered around 40%—but it could still spot hidden items at slightly greater depths.
Technology is catching on. Engineers at Caltech have developed a robotic arm controlled via electrodes placed on a human operator’s arm. Outfitted with artificial skin packed with sensors, the robot can transmit tactile information right back to its human counterpart. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, researchers have come up with a sleek alternative to clunky VR gloves: WeTac, a second skin made of hydrogel lined with electrodes, wraps around your palm and fingers, delivering life-like touch sensations in virtual worlds. Welcome to the era where computers might one day have goosebumps.
Lorenzo Jamone, an expert in robotics and artificial intelligence at University College London, sums up the mutual benefit: human and robotic research can feed off one another. By better understanding our own sensory talents, we could design smarter systems—machines that can explore places where touch is impossible, like the surface of Mars, the bottom of our oceans, or fragile archaeological sites.
The implications stretch far and wide. By extending the reach of our tactile sense, engineers could develop more sensitive support tools, non-contact detection devices, or ultra-precise surgical robots navigating tight quarters—all without the need for invasive contact. The field is ripe for practical breakthroughs.
Zooming out, this study—published in IEEE Xplore—could be said to reinvent what perception means. If humans can detect more than direct physical contact, maybe our senses are a good deal more flexible (and powerful) than we’ve given them credit for. Who knows—maybe one day, we’ll be able to feel the invisible. Spiderman, eat your heart out.