The sense of touch is involved in nearly all human activities, but information technologies for displaying tactile sensory information to the skin are rudimentary when compared to state‐of‐the‐art video and audio displays, or to tactile perceptual capabilities. Realizing tactile displays with good perceptual fidelity will require major advances in engineering, design, and fabrication. Research over several decades has highlighted the difficulties of meeting the required performance benchmarks using conventional devices, processes, and techniques. This has highlighted the important role that will be played by new material technologies that can bridge the electronic and mechanical domains. This must occur at the smallest scales, because of the great perceptual spatial and temporal acuity of the sense of touch. The requirements involved also furnish valuable performance benchmarks against which many emerging material technologies are being evaluated. This article highlights recent research and possibilities enabled through new material technologies, ranging from organic electronic materials, to carbon nanomaterials, and a variety of composites. Emerging material technologies are surveyed for the sense of touch, including sensory considerations and requirements, materials, actuation principles, and design and fabrication methods. A conclusion reflects on the main open challenges and future prospects for research in this area.

Conventional rigid electronic systems use a number of metallization layers to route all necessary connections to and from isolated surface mount devices using well-established printed circuit board technology. In contrast, present solutions to prepare stretchable electronic systems are typically confined to a single stretchable metallization layer. Crossovers and vertical interconnect accesses remain challenging; consequently, no reliable stretchable printed circuit board (SPCB) method has established. This article reports an industry compatible SPCB manufacturing method that enables multilayer crossovers and vertical interconnect accesses to interconnect isolated devices within an elastomeric matrix. As a demonstration, a stretchable (260%) active matrix with integrated electronic and optoelectronic surface mount devices is shown that can deform reversibly into various 3D shapes including hemispherical, conical or pyramid.

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