I'd like to extend this to fucking VR. All VR experiences lack one thing: full body haptics. Take something inspired from the "Pacific Rim" cockpits ( http://i.imgur.com/DLze6j7.jpg ) so you can have some contraption giving you a huge freedom of movement and haptic feedback everywhere. That'd make some games a lot more immersive and physical.
The reason games don’t feel physical is not because of which senses are being stimulated, it’s how they are stimulated.
If the game is just waiting for your hand to enter a bounding box, that’s a 0-dimensional interaction, which feels like nothing. If you could hear your fingers getting close to things, and see the angles between your body and other surfaces, sense through visual texture the relationship your body has with different fields, you would register those things a “physical” experiences.
Touch doesn’t feel like touch because it’s your fingers, it feels like touch because it’s rich and continuous and textured and perfectly grounded in body-space.
You can make proprioaudiovisual experiences like that too, it’s just hard and there are easier ways to make video games that make money.
The science is clear that our brains don’t care which sense data comes from, they just care about the structure of the data.
Although there are anatomical structures that make some senses better at processing one structure than another, they don’t prevent the brain from using those senses for other schemas, if the environment demands it (injury, prosthetics, etc)
