Feeling VR objects through your fingertips with haptic gloves
I just watched a video on the Reality Lab’s haptic gloves and it blew my mind. Check this out…
Haptics are somewhat different to the sense of touch. When you squeeze a tennis ball, it pushes back against your fingers. This provides more information about the nature of the tennis ball than is provided by the touch information from your fingertips were you to merely stroke the surface of the tennis ball instead.
When you shake someone’s hand, they squeeze your hand as your hand squeezes theirs. Most people tend to modulate the amount of force they produce so that the “haptic feedback” they receive from your hand (and vice versa) is in the range of not too hard, not to soft, but just right. It’s something we use every day, helping us to automatically apply more force when lifting a full kettle versus and empty one, for example, but which operates mostly beneath the level of conscious awareness.
In 2008-2009 I was doing post-doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen, Germany and our multisensory brain imaging lab was on very good terms with a nearby lab who worked on multisensory integration using haptics. They gave me the change to stick my hand in one of their haptic feedback simulators, which was essentially a glove with numerous pistons attached designed to push back against your hand movements in a manner that produced the illusion of various haptic sensations.
Looking through a pair of fixed VR goggles I could see a brightly lit 3D dice and was invited to reach out, pick it up and roll it. They could change the “material” it was made out of at the touch of a button so that the squishy feeling of the “rubber” dice was immediately replaced by the rock hard, hand feel of a “steel” dice. Adding another layer of sound to this deepened the illusion yet further. When I released the rubber dice and watched it ricochet around the box like a bouncy ball, it made a deep, satisfying, thunk every time I saw it collide with a surface. When I released the steel dice, it clattered around with sharp, high pitched, metallic sounds.
The illusions you can create with virtual reality technology are already pretty amazing when limited only to visual and auditory information (sights and sounds). But adding in this third sensory dimension of haptic feedback only makes it EVEN MORE compelling. At present a half decent pair of haptic feedback gloves will set you back around $5,000. Yet these will eventually become a normal, everyday part of the Metaverse - enabling people to bend down to pet a passing cat, high five people they meet in social VR apps and perhaps even remotely operate robotic counterparts somewhere in the real world (or beyond) with a level of dexterity that could only be achieved right now in person.
