Programmable matter for digital touch

TechFirst with John Koetsier

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10d ago 27:14

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We’ve digitized sound. We’ve digitized light. But touch, maybe the most human of our senses, has stayed stubbornly analog.

That might be about to change, thanks to programmable matter. Or programmable fabric.

In this TechFirst episode, I speak with Adam Hopkins, CEO of Sensetics, a new UC Berkeley/Virginia Tech spinout building programmable fabrics that replicate the mechanoreceptors in human fingertips. Their technology can sense touch at tens of microns, respond at hardware-level speeds, and even play back touch remotely.

This could unlock enormous change for:

• Robotics: giving machines the ability to grasp fragile objects safely

• Medical training and surgery: remote palpation and high-fidelity haptics

• Industrial automation: safer and more precise manipulation

• VR and simulations: finally adding the missing digital sense

• E-commerce: touching clothes before you buy them

• Remote operations: from hazardous environments to deep-sea machinery

We talk about how the technology works, the metamaterials behind it, why touch matters for AI and physical robots, the path to commercialization, competitive landscape, and what comes next.

00:00 – Can we digitize touch?

00:45 – Introducing Synthetix

01:10 – How programmable touch fabrics work

02:15 – Micron-level sensing and metamaterials

04:00 – The “programmable matter” moment

06:05 – Why touch matters more than we think

07:30 – Emulating human mechanoreceptors

09:30 – What digital touch unlocks for robotics

10:40 – Medical simulations and remote operations

12:45 – Why touch is faster than vision

14:20 – Humanoids, walking, stability, and tactile feedback

15:30 – Engineering challenges and what’s left to solve

17:00 – Timeline to first products

18:20 – Manufacturing and scaling

19:30 – First planned markets

21:00 – Durability and robotic hands

22:20 – Consumer applications: e-commerce and textiles

24:00 – Will we one day have touch peripherals?

25:15 – Competition in tactile sensing and haptics

27:00 – Why today is the right moment for digital touch

28:00 – Final thoughts

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