Digitalses

Digitalses is a term used in discussions of digital perception to describe a class of digital artefacts and systems that encode, transmit, or simulate sensory information in electronic form. The term, a blend of digital and senses, is used to distinguish multimodal sensory representations from plain data and to emphasize the embodiment and interpretation of digital stimuli in interfaces and devices.

Origin and scope: The phrase emerged in academic and industry discourse in the early 2020s as researchers sought a concise label for sensory-enabled digital content and prototypes. It does not refer to a single standard or technology, but rather to a family of approaches that map real-world sensations to digital signals and back.

Technical concept: Digitalses involve encoding sensory modalities such as vision, audition, touch, taste, and smell into digital signals, often with calibration, normalization, and synchronization across channels. They rely on sensors, data processing pipelines, and perceptual rendering techniques to preserve fidelity while enabling compression, privacy controls, and real-time interaction.

Applications: In virtual reality and telepresence, Digitalses enable more immersive experiences. They are used in digital twins for industrial monitoring, medical simulations, sensory prosthetics testing, and digital art that evokes non-visual modalities.

Challenges and criticism: The lack of standard definitions hinders interoperability. Privacy and consent concerns arise when sensory data include biometric or intimate information. Technical barriers include fidelity limits, latency, and ethical questions about manipulation of perceived reality and sensory overload.

Related topics include digital twin, multisensory interfaces, haptics, and perceptual computing.