The Virtual Life of Textiles: a Provisional Haptic Library Model

This article addresses the untapped haptic potential of digital textile collections by outlining a theoretical model relying on visual hapticity (Lécuyer, 2009) rather than the use of haptic devices (Furukawa et al. 2019), which is the more common approach. Visual hapticity remains underexplored in fashion mainly because it is underpinned by complex cognitive processes (Jang and Ha, 2021; Mlakaret et al. 2021). Thus the main question arises: how can an embodied approach to 3D technologies expand haptic visuality and expose the haptic/tactile qualities of materials, inducing an extended sense of touch and producing a more immersive, dense and intense user experience that enables the acquisition of tacit knowledge? We aim to answer this question by proposing a theoretical model where haptic visuality, meta-materiality and immersive exploration represent the fundamental basis in the interaction between media and tools that can enable new experiences in the digital environment.