In the world of virtual reality, there’s still plenty of room for improvements. Especially when it comes to experiencing haptic feedback, there is no real working solution as of yet. Recently unveiled patents belonging to Oculus show the company is actively working on such technology as we speak. A haptic glove for VR will certainly introduce a lot of changes.
The Oculus VR Haptic Gloves
It is quite interesting to see how companies decide to tackle the lack of haptic feedback in VR. As of right now, users can interact with virtual objects, yet they won’t “feel” anything. While that is not necessarily a big problem, it can break the immersive aspect virtual reality is well-known for. Coming up with a viable solution has not been easy.
Although various companies are working on such a solution, it remains to be seen how successful they will be. Oculus is apparently working on VR haptic gloves, according to two different patents. These patents date back to 216 but were only made public last week. Both patents are identical as to how they provide haptic feedback through proprietary gloves who use tendons plugged into an accentuator to simulate the sense of touch.
Even though these patents show Oculus has an interest in the technology, it doesn’t mean they will effectively build them. Additionally, the patents confirm haptic feedback will not be provided with all fingers, although that seems to make a lot of sense. For now, we have to wait and see how all of this plays out in the future, as there are still a lot of unknown factors.
A lot of VR enthusiasts would gladly sign up for haptic feedback testing as of right now. Since so many games and experiences rely on interaction, getting some sense of touch would be more than appreciated. It is not easy to mimic this feeling through hardware and software, though. There is still a lot of work to be done until this technology can effectively become of great use.
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