It’s been close to three weeks since I purchased my wife an iPad (a birthday present that was as much as a present for me as it was for her; you learn to do this sort of thing after you live long enough in Silicon Valley). That’s enough time for me to have formed several strong-yet-shared opinions about the new device. Opinions such as, the iPad is more of an iPod or iPhone than a computer (though all three, one might argue, are computers). Also, the opinion (widely shared) that the iPad provides so much variety of experience that it may be some time before we know the killer app. But for me, the biggest revelation came in kind of a “duh” moment. Regardless of what else the iPad is doing for business people, markets, and applications, the device is teaching the world to touch as a preferred way to do “personal computing,” a thing that’s constantly being redefined.

Touch is not a new technology. It’s been around many years, but mostly as a labs-and future-of-technology showcase. Of course, the iPod/iPhone changed all that, and it’s fair to say that Apple and its many device-manufacturer followers have been teaching the world to touch for several years now. I got a good reminder of this about a year ago when I picked up a magazine and unconsciously spread my fingers over the print, attempting to make the type bigger; the iPhone had already trained me to use a computer UI to navigate the world of physical media (a creepy but enlightening moment). But what many people are discovering this month is that touch is a much more compelling modality when the form factor — the size, weight, and field of play of the device — is right. Many things that worked OK on the iPhone work even better on the iPad. If the iPhone was the first device to begin to teach the world to touch, the iPad may usher in a bigger wave of education. And if that happens, all the hype surrounding Apple’s magical device will be deserved. Because of if the world learns to touch, computing may in fact change forever.

But what’s all the fuss about touch? If you have a touch-screen phone, iPod or iPad, some of the benefits should be obvious. For example, with a number of computing tasks — e.g., sorting through photos — touch makes for a far more efficient experience that the mouse. For things like reading, it makes for a more intimate, natural experience (note how the turning-the-pages feature in iBooks mimics the physical-world experience of reading books). But perhaps the most profound thing about touch is — duh — the sensory component. Computing used to be only about seeing and hearing. Now that it’s also about touching, we can begin reimagining how computing will further enable us to traverse the physical and virtual worlds, which increasingly compete for our time. Hard to clearly imagine where this is all going, but the immediate horizon is beginning to become visible. To me, the most interesting experiments in augmented reality anticipate a new wave of innovation in device design where the motion of our wrist, hands, and fingers can help us bridge the physical and virtual worlds. (E.g., the “Sixth Sense” project, prominently featured at TED (see below)).

This is only the beginning, of course. But it won’t be long, I think, before a cunning marketeer catches and exploits the sad irony in all of this. For among all the senses, “touch” is the one we most associate with human intimacy, and our technology experiments with touch are happening at a time when so much of the world has lost its ability to touch — in part because of the increasing amount of time we spend behind screens. This is not entirely new — we’ve been moving in this direction for quite some time, enough to inspire an AT&T marketing team back in 1979 to exhort the world to “reach out and touch someone.” It was the dawn of the PC age, but already the world was losing its ability to touch. Expect innovation and surprise on both the technology and marketing fronts now that touch has a compelling virtual analog.