Sushma Subramanian: Flirting, Haptically

While working on a book about the sense of touch, science journalist Sushma Subramanian experiments with haptic technology to connect with her long-distance fiance.

Sushma Subramanian is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Mary Washington, where she advises the staff of the campus newspaper, The Blue & Gray Press. She is also a freelance magazine writer focusing on the intersection of science and culture. Her most recent stories are about the neuroscience behind her struggles to relearn her forgotten first language and the ongoing legal battle surrounding the unethical Guatemala syphilis experiments. Her work has appeared in Discover, Slate, Foreign Policy and many other publications. Her book on the sense of touch is forthcoming.

This story originally aired on Oct. 6, 2018, in an episode titled “Sense of Touch”.

 
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Story Transcript

We break up the weekend before I move.  My boyfriend Kartik and I have gotten into, yet, another argument, this time about where to go eat.  He has suggested a meaty Chinese restaurant on the lower east side of New York.  I’m vegetarian so my interpretation was he does not care about me. 

Yes, it was stupid but it was just like many others that we've been having over months ever since I had been offered a job teaching journalism at a university south of DC.  Kartik had supported my decision to take the position but, as the move came closer, it became clear he was becoming reticent about joining me.  And we had been talking about marriage so this spooked me. 

That’s what our argument was really about.  It was not just that I couldn’t eat Dandan noodles. 

About twelve hours after we have decided to go our separate ways, I call my parents to tell them the sad news, that Kartik and I are no more.  They also know about our plans to get married and they have told their relatives in India all about it.  They have been freaking out about arranging my marriage ever since I was twenty-three.  I’m thirty-two now and they're convinced that Kartik is my final option, and I’m blowing it. 

“What will we tell everyone?” they ask.

At the end of this conversation, I am exhausted not just from the conversation itself but also because of weeks of back and forth with Kartik and a decade of familial pressure.  So I turn to Kartik and I say, “Let’s just do it.  Let’s get engaged.” 

He looks really sorry for me, and he says, “Okay.” 

Two days later, we go to one of our favorite restaurants in Brooklyn and we have a nice dinner.  Then we walk over to Prospect Park and under a tree we propose to each other.  This is the story that we tell everybody.  We leave out the parts about his freak-out and our breakup and my desperate plea. 

A couple of days after that, I move to Fredericksburg, Virginia alone.  I’m in a long-distance relationship with my fiancé. 

As I’m sitting there by myself, I start to wonder, did we jump into this?  Did I force Kartik into something he didn’t want to do?  Was this all a huge mistake? 

But I don't tell him any of this.  Instead I talk about how much fun I’m having with my students and getting to know my colleagues and checking out Pinterest pages with ideas for our wedding. 

While all this is going on, I have been working on this book about the sense of touch.  I've been doing my research.  Touch is fascinating to me because it involves so many innate abilities in our body.  There's movement, there's an understanding of position, there's the feeling on our skin and our emotional reactions. 

There's also more interest in touch lately because of the field of haptics, which is focused on doing things like building robots that can feel and adding more tactile interaction with our technology. 

Touch was an unexpected subject for me mostly because I never really liked it that much.  When I was growing up, my dad used to call me a Touch-Me-Not after the fern that folds in on itself when it’s stroked with a finger because I would shrink away whenever he came too close. 

I still freak out a little bit when I get touched.  I’m not crazy.  There are people I do like to touch.  I like to touch Kartik but I think it’s my fear around touch that drew me to this subject.  I think it takes someone who has such a strong visceral reaction to touch to notice it because it’s a sense that so often operates in the background of our consciousness. 

For my research, I had gone to the World Haptics Conference in Chicago where I met some Northwestern engineers who had built these devices called TPads.  They were basically tablets and phones that were enabled with special touch effects.  So a person might feel the lines of a grid on the screen or, if you put your finger down in a drawing application, you can actually feel some texture.  This was done by altering the vibration pattern on the screen depending on where it was touched. 

It was all really interesting but the creators themselves wondered, what could this be used for?  How could this really enhance the relationship that we have with our devices?  And so they had suggested that I take some phones and play around with them myself.  I’m hoping that by doing this, maybe I can help them figure out the answer to their questions. 

I get the phones a few weeks into my new job and my next trip up to New York to visit Kartik, during which we’re still snapping at each other because we’re not talking honestly, I give a phone to him and I pose it as an experiment that we’re going to conduct together.  By sending each other haptic images, maybe we can figure out what touch is even good for. 

That first week he sends me a couple of interesting photographs of the wood grains of his desk at work and the lines on the palm of his hand.  A program on the phone converts these black and white images into a textural pattern depending on how they're shaded.  It’s kind of cool to feel but, to be honest, it’s not that compelling.  After a few rounds of back and forth, we stop because it’s kind of annoying to carry around an extra-bulky phone. 

At this point I’m feeling kind of dejected.  I guess my experiment is not working and perhaps the conclusion is that haptics are not that useful. 

So I end up talking to a new colleague about my situation.  He's a computer science professor and together we come up with an idea.  Maybe the problem is that we’re just exchanging static images.  What if, instead, I was able to touch Kartik virtually in real time? 

It turns out that my colleague’s son who lives in Austin in his spare time develops smartphone apps and he says he can create one for us. 

A week later, it’s ready.  I try it out with him at first.  So he puts his finger down on the screen and what I see on my end is the image of a heat map of his fingerprint.  When I put my finger down on it and then move it across, I feel a slight haptic bump.  It’s kind of amazing how much a tiny change in the vibration can actually feel like it’s warping the shape of the glass. 

But after I do this for a few more seconds, I have to stop.  I am creeped out.  It feels as strange as if I were actually fondling a real stranger’s finger.  I don't know him well enough to ask him if he feels the same way so instead I tell him, “thank you,” and get off the phone really quickly. 

A couple of days later, Kartik gets that phone in the mail and we try it out.  At first, our fingers meet up at the center of the screen and we kind of rub them against each other.  Then I move my finger away and he follows me.  I dart away and he tries to catch me again.  I let him catch me and we keep our fingers there for a moment and then they start nuzzling each other.  We are flirting haptically. 

It’s a very subtle effect but it’s surprising how moving it is.  It’s the first time in a really long time that we've allowed ourselves to connect and it’s a reminder that I think we both need that we need to spend moments like this, enjoying each other’s company and not over-thinking everything that’s happened between us. 

It’s not like the relationship immediately changes after all of this but we do start talking more honestly and we realize that we wouldn’t have actually stayed broken up.  The reason we were so comfortable proposing to each other after all of that had happened was that we knew we were going to get back together at the end. 

A couple of months later, he gets a job not too far from me and then we move into our first apartment together.  Then, soon after that, we get married at a public park in Oakland, California surrounded by friends and family. 

I still get teary eyed thinking about that day when I was sitting in my room feeling Kartik touch me not in person but mediated through a screen.  When the words weren’t coming and our relationship was at its most intense, it was through touch that we were finally able to express ourselves.  Thank you.