Those who were strong in the force were able to unlock the supernatural powers of the force
through focus and training.
Many of these force abilities were easy to learn and master, such as telekinesis and
the mind trick.
Others not so much, requiring years of dedicated training and practice.
And then there were special abilities that one needed to be born with to even have a
chance to learn and master.
One of these abilities was known as Psychometry, and one of the very few to be able to use
it was Jedi Master Quinlan Vos.
Psychometry was a power that allowed its user to see visions of events exactly as they went
down by simply touching an object that was used during the said event.
For example if Quinlan were to pick up a sniper rifle that was used in an assassination he
would receive a vision showing him who used it, at what time, and at what target.
This force power also allowed Quinlan to sense the feelings of the object’s wielder both
emotional and physical during its use.
Because of this the Jedi Council discouraged the use of this ability on dead bodies as
they believed the intensely painful and strong emotions felt before death could affect a
Jedi’s mental state and increase the chances of them falling to the dark side.
There were cases where users who used this power too frequently were known at times to
have their minds get stuck in the visions they were witnessing, and in some very rare
cases, even get killed by the vision if it was too intense or was corrupted.
In Canon, Quinlan Vos was known to use psychometry during his undercover missions where he’d
use to it to track down crime lords and other significant persons who had escaped from Republic
prisons.
In other cases he used it to uncover and expose murderers and thieves.
During his undercover mission to assassinate Count Dooku, Quinlan used this power on a
nightsister’s bow and was able to witness the entire massacre of the nightsisters perpetrated
by General Grievous.
Such a harsh vision left him cold and hurt.
When captured by Dooku, the Sith Lord forced Quinlan to use the power on his fallen master’s
lightsaber, Jedi Master Tholme, who had been murdered by Quinlan’s lover at the time
Asajj Ventress.
Prior to that Ventress had lied to him by telling him that it was Dooku who had murdered
his master.
But after having the truth be revealed to him, Quinlan turned against his lover and
former ally and fell to the dark side, becoming Dooku’s new Sith apprentice.
In Legends, Quinlan used psychometry in pretty much the same manner as he did in Canon, by
using it to track down specific individuals or important artifacts to bring back to his
masters.
However in Legends Quinlan was also taught the dark side version of psychometry by Dooku
when he was infiltrating the Sith Lord’s inner circle.
Dooku encouraged Quinlan to try to empower his psychometry ability with the dark side
and then to attempt to use it on a living being to forcibly extract information from
them.
Quinlan did just that and successfully was able to extract a deep secret held by his
prisoner, discovering that the being had murdered his parents.
Learning this secret of his parents’ fate and having just used the dark side, Quinlan
lost control of his senses and killed the prisoner out of sheer rage.
The near-human species that Quinlan Vos was apart of, named Kiffar, were uniquely connected
to the force where about one out of a hundred of their species were born with the ability
to learn psychometry.
Most Kiffer that were born with this power became Kiffu Guardians, which acted as a military
police force on their planets.
The only other known characters to possess the psychometry ability were the dark Jedi
Boc Aseca, who used it on a few missions during his service to the Galactic Empire, and Luke
Skywalker, who due to his immensely powerful connection to the force, was able to tap into
its power to some degree despite not being born with it like Quinlan.
In one case when Luke was walking through a historically destroyed Tusken raider village,
his immature psychometry abilities turned on the moment he took a step into the village’s
remains.
It showed him a distorted vision of Anakin Skywalker slaughtering all of the village's
people and showing him the scars that his grandmother, Shmi Skywalker, had right before
she died.
Such an event left Luke unsettled, and he was only able to describe it as something
worse than a nightmare.