People are touchy-feely beings. We hug, hold hands, high-five, and use our hands to interact with objects as life requires. In VR, we use handheld controllers to pick up items and search through rooms, use them as weapons, boxing gloves, to walk, run, and even grapple off walls in games. Kickr Design’s VRgluv is a wireless virtual reality haptic glove company that our VR fans will love to know about. Keep reading to find out more.
What is VRgluv?
In the near future and for a moderate price tag of $400, consumers will be able to purchase the wireless haptic feedback gloves that recent Georgia Tech and Caltech graduates Chris Taylor, Derek Kearney, and Steven Fullerton have successfully developed.
VRgluv’s haptic gloves will take the place of controllers inside games and experiences like the ones described above. The gloves become the wearer’s hands and fingers, so there’s likely not much of a learning curve unless you’re new to the VR scene. They allow the wearer to pick up and manipulate large and small items and supports throwing and even using them along with virtual baseball bats.
Watch this video to find out more about what VRgluv can do!
How It Feels
We haven’t tried VRgluvs just yet, but Americaninno gives a first-hand account of what it was like to try out the new gloves, with the author explaining how she “pulverized rocks into dust with my fingers. I stacked blocks on top of each other and could feel the tiny vibration of tapping one wooden block against another, just like in childhood. I played on a chess board that wasn’t even there, and then bopped the pieces around in midair like an astronaut with an “anti-gravity” setting.”
The publication went on to share the gloves especially funny feature, “After that, the team turned my hand into a tiny one (like the ones you see in memes on Twitter) that had even more strength and grip than my normal-sized virtual one. Sharing a high-five in the virtual world is a completely new definition of “cool.” Imagine what a future of embodying a mutant with superpowers or a heavyweight boxer in VR could look like with these gloves instead of controllers. Now that’s freaking cool.
Force Feedback
Their haptic gloves are made out of material that flexes with the fingers and hand and has outer casings that house 10 tracking zone sensors. The gloves add to the immersion of VR with their ability to relay up to 5 pounds of force feedback onto the wearer’s fingers as they pick up and feel the presence of blocks to the swinging a baseball bat and feeling the impact of hitting a baseball.
The wireless gloves have low latency (10ms) and also have 360-degree thumb tracking and 12 DoF (12 degrees of freedom) with motion and gestures. The gloves fine-tuned finger tracking provides a more natural gestural communication between players and will open up a means of communication for deaf VR fans to communicate with sign language! This could help improve the quality of experience users will have at arcades, gyms, and other location-based experiences.
VR Fitness Potential
VR aficionados with an Oculus, Vive, or Windows Mixed Reality headset can use VRgluv once it’s released to the public. These are peripherals used in our very own office and by our readers to shape up and get a thrill.
There are thousands of VR games in the Oculus Store, Viveport, and on Steam to exercise and have fun with. What’s missing for VRgluv is an SDK (software development kit) for game applications so studios and developers will customize haptic force feedback sensations and object presence to games and experiences like the baseball simulation above.
Once a kit opportunity is presented the fitness potential for the gloves will skyrocket. Ambitious developers and studios behind the top VR fitness games will want to contact VRgluv about collaborating or vice versa. To reach out to them, please visit their website and scroll to the bottom of the page. There you’ll find a digital form to fill out. After there are games for fitness that can use the haptic gloves fans will use it for exercise.
Where To Find Them
Forums online anticipated that June 2018 was the VRgluv release date, but is currently unknown at this time. Find VRgluv on their website, on Twitter, Facebook, and Vimeo to sign up for their updates.