Now that the Apple Watch is finally out in the wild, millions will be experiencing the next big thing for user interfaces. Call it “haptics plus.”

Haptics normally involves actuators, or tiny vibration motors, to either convey information, create a touch illusion of some kind, or both. (If you’ve ever played a console game, you’ve felt the vibrations in the controller designed to simulate action in the game.)

The new trend in haptic feedback is to combine haptics with “something else” to crank up the illusion of action, motion, texture and even the illusion of touching something that isn’t there.

In the Apple Watch, and in the latest MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, that something else is a feature that Apple calls “Force Touch,” which is the use of pressure as a gesture.

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