Touch, often called the ‘first sense’, is fundamental to how we experience and know ourselves, others and the world. Increasingly, touch is being brought into the digital landscape. This paper explores this shifting landscape to understand the ways in which touch is re-mediated in the context of virtual reality. With attention to the sensoriality and sociality of touch, it asks what ‘counts’ as touch in VR, how is touch experienced and how is it incorporated into meaning making. We present and discuss findings from a multimodal and multisensory study of 16 participants interacting in two VR experiences to describe: the participants’ material encounters with the virtual through a focus on touch practices, expectations and norms; the ways in which participants made meaning of (and with) virtual touch through their dynamic selection and orchestration of the range of semiotic and experiential resources available; and how these virtual touch experiences translated into discourses of touch in VR to emphasize continuities and change between the past, present and futures. The paper comments on the methodological challenges of researching touch in the emergent landscape of VR and asks how multimodality might engage newly with touch, perhaps the most under-rated and neglected of modes and senses, and its digital remediation.

触摸，通常称为“第一感觉”，是我们体验和认识自己，他人和世界的基础。触摸技术正越来越多地被带入数字景观。本文 探讨了这种不断 变化的格局，以了解在虚拟现实环境中重新调节触摸的方式。在关注触摸 的 感官性 和社交性的同时，它询问在VR中什么“算作”为触摸，如何体验触摸以及如何将其纳入意义创造中。 我们提出并讨论了对16位参与者进行的多模式，多感官 研究 的结果 在两种VR体验中进行交互以描述：参与者通过重点放在触摸习惯，期望和规范上与虚拟对象进行实质性的相遇；参与者通过 动态选择和编排可用的符号和体验资源的范围来使虚拟触摸具有意义（以及具有虚拟触摸的意义）的方式；以及如何将这些虚拟触摸体验转化为VR中的触摸话语，以强调过去，现在和未来之间的连续性和变化。 在研究触摸的方法上的挑战本文评论 中VR的紧急景观，并询问如何多模态可能参与 新 触摸，也许是最被低估和忽视的方式和感觉，而其数字整治。