A thin, replaceable skin that allows robots to "feel" could help in the construction of the metaverse, the proposed virtual future of the internet being developed by Meta (formerly Facebook) and others. The skin, jointly developed by Meta and Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, combines a rubbery plastic less than 3 millimetres thick and studded with magnetic particles with an artificial intelligence to calibrate its sense of touch. "If you look at how AI has advanced, we've made huge advances in computer vision and sound," says Abhinav Gupta at Meta AI Research. "But conspicuously, touch has been missing from this advancement." When the skin touches a surface, the plastic deforms and alters the magnetic field created by the embedded particles.