alt Hacker NewsXR hardware needs actors, this is about sensors.
An actor that changes temperature is a heater or maybe something like a peltier element, that can heat and cool. A sensor is the opposite: a thermometer that measures what temperature is somewhere.
Needless to say these are fundamentally different technologies. Sure, you need one to develope the other: e.g. to create a temperature sensing skin with high spatial resolution, you will need to generate precise spatial temperatures to test the whole thing.
Yes, the skin sensor technology in the article is about translating real world heat and touch sensations into electrical signals that can be interpreted by human nervous systems via prosthetics.
XR haptics, on the other hand, convert electrical signals into real world sensations.
While the two technologies are fundamentally different, they are also complementary. The process of 'serializing' and 'deserializing' analog touch data into a digital data storage format has multiple cross purpose applications.