This new innovation by Facebook Reality Labs allows you to touch and feel. One of Facebook’s Reality Labs Research teams is focused on inventing the future of interaction in augmented and virtual reality. This team’s goal is to create the technology to solve one of the central challenges of the Metaverse.
Imagine working on a virtual 3D puzzle with a friend’s realistic 3D avatar. As you pick up a virtual puzzle piece from the table, your fingers automatically stop moving as you feel it within your grasp. You feel the sharpness of the cardboard’s edges and the smoothness of its surface as you hold it up for closer inspection, followed by a satisfying snap as you fit it into place.
To enable this experience and bring touch to the Metaverse, the team is developing haptic gloves: comfortable and customizable gloves that can reproduce a range of sensations in virtual worlds, including texture, pressure and vibration. While we’re still in the early stages of this research, the goal is to one day pair the gloves with your VR headset for an immersive experience like playing in a concert or poker game in the Metaverse, and eventually they’d work with your AR glasses.
Meta is not the only company working on this type of haptic glove for VR applications. Notably, HaptX has also been working on a glove that is driven by pneumatics, and is making its devices available to developers for VR and industrial robotics applications, reports www.protocol.com/meta-haptic-gloves.
For gaming, this means a paradigm shift.
Gamers all around the world can actually indulge in a more real sort of experience.
Facebook Reality Lab’s haptic glove project started as a moonshot, but it’s increasingly feasible as we continue to innovate and complete research. Over the last seven years, they have pioneered new techniques, technologies and disciplines, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with soft robotics and inventing entirely new materials and manufacturing processes. Moving each of these research areas forward requires time to get the technology right, so while our haptic glove research will remain in the lab for now, we’re excited about the progress we’ve made and the potential it shows for a virtual world you can touch.
Learn more about the haptic glove project, and follow @itp.live for more updates.Â