When Touch Acts as an Illusion: The Strange Promise of Pseudo-Haptics

It begins with a slight hesitation of the cursor. You move your mouse across a screen, and for a moment, it seems as though you’re tracing the contours of a surface — a bump, perhaps, or a slight depression in a virtual landscape. There is no physical texture beneath your fingertips, no mechanical feedback vibrating through the hardware. Yet, somehow, you feel it.

This curious phenomenon is known as pseudo-haptics — the illusion of touch, conjured not by mechanical actuators but by the clever orchestration of our senses. It is an enchantment of perception, a trick that persuades our brain to believe in the solidity of the immaterial. And in an era increasingly defined by digital encounters, pseudo-haptics offers not just technological intrigue but a profound reimagining of how we connect with our virtual worlds — and with each other.

At its heart, pseudo-haptics taps into an almost preconscious truth about how humans perceive reality: our senses do not operate in isolation. Instead, they blend and negotiate with one another in a dynamic dance, stitching together a tapestry of experience from imperfect and incomplete threads. As enactivism reminds us, cognition is not confined to the brain alone; it is embodied, enacted through our muscles, eyes, skin and senses. We do not simply think — we feel, we move, we anticipate and this shapes our cognitive make up.

The beauty of pseudo-haptics lies in this interplay. Without the need for bulky hardware or force-feedback devices, innovators can create convincing tactile experiences purely through visual cues and the way they manipulate our expectations. A cursor slows as it "climbs" a virtual bump. A drifting mouse simulates a slippery surface. These subtle cues are sometimes enough to convince the brain that it is encountering resistance or texture, thanks to its reliance on visual information to guide sensory interpretation.

Such illusions are not mere parlour tricks. They are deeply embedded in the predictive nature of perception. Our brains are perpetually in the business of forecasting sensory outcomes based on past experience and current action. When these expectations are artfully manipulated — when what we see suggests what we might feel — the brain can obligingly fill in the blank.

This is not new territory for cognitive science, but it is fertile ground for innovators and designers of our increasingly intangible world. Pseudo-haptics shifts the design conversation from hardware constraints to cognitive possibilities. It invites us to design not for the hand, but for the mind’s idea of the hand.

Researchers like Pusch and Lécuyer have mapped the theoretical foundations of this curious magic. Drawing on models like Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS) and Bayesian Multimodal Cue Integration, they explain how pseudo-haptic experiences emerge from the synthesis of high-level cognitive processes and the probabilistic blending of sensory inputs. In plain terms, this means our brain leans heavily on familiar sensory patterns — privileging reliable visual cues when tactile information is ambiguous or absent. The result? An illusory, yet surprisingly convincing, sense of touch.

These illusions work not only for static textures but also for dynamic properties like stiffness and resistance. In an experiment, researchers asked participants to manipulate a digital cube via touchscreen devices. The more force applied, the more the cube seemed to deform — not because of any mechanical feedback, but because of careful visual orchestration. Even more remarkable was the collaborative version of the task: two users, working from separate devices, successfully coordinated their efforts to assess the "stiffness" of a shared virtual object.

Such moments are more than academic curiosities. They hint at the future of remote collaboration, of digital intimacy. Imagine sculptors shaping virtual clay together from opposite sides of the globe, or surgeons training side by side in a shared simulated environment. Pseudo-haptics, by transcending the physical limitations of hardware, promises to bring texture and nuance to interactions that would otherwise be flat .

And here, a provocative horizon begins to unfold. As artificial intelligence and autonomous agents become more deeply embedded in our digital landscapes, pseudo-haptics offers a way to render these invisible actors more tangible, more felt. In the emerging vision of the Internet of Agents — where autonomous software agents interact with one another, negotiate tasks, and collaborate with humans — pseudo-haptics could offer a means of humanizing the interface. Imagine feeling the resistance of an AI companion as you co-manipulate a design, or experiencing the subtle tug of a virtual collaborator guiding your motion in a complex task.

Instead of passive, one-way commands issued to machines, interaction becomes a kind of embodied dialogue — a push and pull, an exchange of gestures across the human-machine divide. In such a future, your relationship with an AI agent is no longer abstract or transactional but felt in your fingertips, laden with nuance and presence.

Designing for and building trust amongst users for AI solutions is no easy feat. When collaborating in the real world, we rely heavily on nonverbal communication to share ideas — the small cues, the unspoken adjustments, the quiet give-and-take that helps us understand each other’s intentions and responses in the moment. AI agents, however, won’t be able to draw on these natural human signals; instead, they will need new forms of communication to express intent, adapt to human input, and create the subtle sense of responsiveness that fosters trust in shared work. Pseudo-haptics can help establish those new forms of communication.

And as our screens themselves become smarter, more responsive, and materially dynamic, the fusion of pseudo-haptics with intelligent surfaces opens even more ambitious vistas. Future smart screens — capable of dynamically altering friction, texture, or even electrostatic sensations — offer a fertile canvas for pseudo-haptics to flourish. Rather than merely displaying information, these screens could embody it. A financial analyst, scanning complex data visualizations, could feel momentary resistance as they swipe across areas of volatility. An architect could sculpt a prototype directly on the surface of their device, experiencing subtle gradients of texture that mirror material properties in the digital model. Even everyday interactions — signing a contract, flipping through a virtual book — could be enriched by tactile nuance, lending the digital world a sense of weight and consequence.

Of course, there are limits. While pseudo-haptics excels at conveying broad perceptual differences — the bump versus the hole, the soft versus the stiff — it struggles with the fine-grained subtleties that true haptics deliver. Yet even these shortcomings speak to the power of the illusion. The fact that, absent real tactile feedback, users can still draw accurate renderings of perceived textures speaks volumes about the mind’s eagerness to play along.

What emerges from ongoing research in the matter is not just a novel technical toolkit but a philosophical provocation. Pseudo-haptics challenges our assumptions about the boundaries of perception. It reveals that touch — that most intimate of senses — can have an imaginative property. The sensation of texture, resistance, or weight is not hardwired into the object, but co-constructed in the moment, born of expectation and engagement.

In this light, pseudo-haptics becomes less a gimmick and perhaps a lens through which to rethink the design of our digital futures. As our lives become increasingly mediated by screens, as we reach out to loved ones and collaborators through glass and code, the ability to conjure a sense of presence and tactility can become a quiet form of resistance against digital flatness in the design world.

To me, the allure of pseudo-haptics transcends mere technology; it embodies a humanistic promise. It serves as a reminder that our most profound experiences are not solely mediated by devices but are instead enriched by the vibrant and imaginative engagement of our own bodies and minds. Ultimately, it is not the machine that evokes our feelings; it is our own capacity to feel and connect.