meta: Meta is working on haptic gloves for you to ‘touch’ objects in the digital world – Times of India

Meta, which was formerly known as Facebook, has been making a lot of noise in the augmented reality and virtual reality world. The whole idea of the ambitious Metaverse revolves heavily around AR and VR. Meta’s Reality Labs Research has shared a glimpse of a pair of haptic gloves that will allow you to touch the digital world.
According to a blog post by Meta, the idea is to have lightweight haptic gloves that “address both sides of the AR/VR interaction problem — helping the computer to accurately understand and reflect the wearer’s hand movements, and reproducing a range of complex, nuanced sensations for the wearer such as pressure, texture, and vibration to create the effect of feeling a virtual object with your hands.”
The blog post further notes that users will be able to pair them with a 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 too. “Far more than simply a peripheral device, these gloves would make the virtual world tangible,” the blog post notes.
The haptic glove needs actuators — or tiny motors — all over the hand to deliver a real sense of touch. A haptic glove can even convince the wearer’s perceptual system that it’s feeling an object’s weight, by gently pulling on the skin of the wearer’s fingers with the actuators to mimic the tug of gravity on a held object. But it all has to be timed exactly right, notes the blog post.
“Today the gloves are made individually by skilled engineers and technicians who manufacture the subsystems and assemble the gloves largely by hand,” says RL Research Process Engineer Katherine Healy. “We use semi-automated processes where we can, but manufacturing these gloves at scale will require the invention of new manufacturing processes.”
As of now, there are no plans from the company for a commercial rollout of the haptic gloves as they still remain in prototype.