Facebook Shows Off Gloves That Allow You to "Feel" VR Objects – Futurism

Facebook is really committed to getting between you and reality, and the gloves are starting to come off or, rather, on.

With its newly announced plans to build out a metaverse, the social network has now announced that its building a haptic glove, a wearable meant to enable you to touch objects in the metaverse.Oh yeah, and its changing its name to Meta.

The value of hands to solving the interaction problem in AR and VR is immense, said Facebook Reality Labs research director Sean Keller in a blog post. People could touch, feel and manipulate virtual objects just like real objects all without having to learn a new way of interacting with the world.

In short, Meta is trying to turn the novel Ready Player One into a reality. Or perhaps, its trying to rip off Nintendos ahead-of-its-time Power Glove.

The companys glove is meant to be light, soft, and also perfectly capture its wearers hand movements. Its being designed to reproduce 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, according to the company.

In other words, Meta is setting the bar extremely high.

Were creating almost everything about this discipline from scratch, Keller said. Were learning how people perceive the sensations of touch and how they complete tasks. Were figuring out how to fit the whole variety of human hand shapes and sizes, while maintaining mechanical coupling to the user.

As of right now, the glove is using hundreds of tiny actuators to trick the wearer into thinking theyre touching something in the virtual world. But theyre far from ideal, creating too much heat. Theyre also too bulky, expensive, and power hungry, according to the company.

If you need thousands of tangible forces in different locations at different distances, you either need pneumatics, hydraulics, or high-density electroactive actuators, Reality Labs hardware engineering director Tristan Trutna said in the post.

The team is now looking into using electrical fields and pneumatic actuators to trick your hands into feeling something.

But that leaves one big question still looming: do we need Metas gloves to make its metaverse feel any more real? The company is betting big on virtual reality, arguing that three-dimensional, cartoonized avatars of our physical bodies will eventually replace human interaction we crave so much especially after nearly two years of COVID lockdowns.

Its a bet so big that its starting to annoy the companys own VPs.

Meta has also repeatedly made one thing clear: it cannot be trusted. Despite being used by billions of people around the world, the network has helped drive people apart, profited directly from pushing provocative content, and continuously leaked sensitive personal data.

And the company isnt inviting you to play a game for an hour, then take the VR goggles off. Metas ambitions appear to be much larger in scope than that and its haptic glove is only the latest example.

Allowing the company to take control over our physicality and sense of touch should come as a warning sign. And weshould probably think twice before committing ourselves to its metaverse.

READ MORE: Inside Reality Labs Research: Meet the team thats working to bring touch to the digital world [Facebook]

More on Facebook: Facebooks Top VR Expert Seems Pretty Annoyed by Metaverse Push

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

Continued here:
Facebook Shows Off Gloves That Allow You to "Feel" VR Objects - Futurism