According to Meta, the team, which is focused on investing in the future of interaction in augmented and virtual reality (VR) has been working on the haptic gloves for the past seven years and during that time has made significant breakthroughs, including developing the world’s first high-speed microfluidic processor.
In a blog post, Meta wrote: “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, the Reality Labs team is developing haptic gloves, which are comfortable and customizable and can reproduce a range of sensations in virtual worlds, including texture, pressure, and vibration. The team is still in the early stages of this research, but the end goal is to pair the gloves with a VR headset for an immersive experience like playing in a concert or poker game in the metaverse.
According to Meta, building these gloves is a challenge that requires inventing entirely new domains of scientific research. Over the past seven years, the team has pushed human-computer interaction forward across dozens of disciplines, creating new breakthroughs to make haptic gloves a reality.
Here are a few examples:
Perceptual science: Because current technology can’t fully recreate the physics of the real world in VR, Reality Labs is exploring the idea of combining auditory, visual and haptic feedback for things like convincing a wearer’s perceptual system that it’s feeling an object’s weight.
Soft robotics: Existing mechanical actuators create too much heat for such a glove to be worn comfortably all day. To solve this, Reality Labs is creating new soft actuators – tiny, soft motors all over the glove that move in concert to deliver sensation to the wearer’s hand.
Microfluidics: Reality Labs is developing the world’s first high-speed microfluidic processor – a small microfluidic chip that controls the air flow that moves the actuators. The use of air (a fluid) means it can fit many more actuators on the glove than would otherwise be possible with electronic circuitry.
Hand tracking: Even with a way to control air flow, the system needs to know when and where to deliver the right sensations. Reality Labs is building advanced hand-tracking technology to enable it to identify precisely where your hand is in a virtual scene, whether you’re in contact with a virtual object and how your hand is interacting with the object.
Haptic rendering: Reality Labs’ haptic renderer sends precise instructions to the actuators on the hand, based on an understanding of things like the hand’s location and properties of the virtual objects (such as texture, weight and stiffness) that the hand comes in contact with.
Meta added, “Our haptic glove project started as a moonshot, but it’s increasingly feasible as we continue to innovate and complete research. Over the past seven years, we’ve 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 Meta’s haptic glove project.