Jenga With HaptX Gloves Threw My Hands Into Virtual Reality
Tech
Speaker 1: Why was suiting up with massive haptic gloves and playing Jenga? The most interesting thing I did at cs, or one of the most interesting, let me tell you.
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, hap, Texas' haptic gloves have been available for years. I just never got a chance to try them. The pandemic happened, these are almost $80,000 for these crazy rigs that you really can't experience almost anywhere else. They use a technological micro fluidic that actually puts air into little bladders that go [00:00:30] up into your fingers and also have cables that pull back and have a sort of a resistance up to eight pounds. There are apparently, you know, 133 different sensors in each hand that will give you senses of pressure. Now, haptics as a technology are usually the sort of things you associate with vibrations on your phone or your watch and stuff like that. It's be, to give you a sense of feedback, and there are a lot of companies that are trying to give you a sense of haptics, but haptics is haptic gloves are doing it with a different type of sensation that [00:01:00] really feels like touch.
Speaker 1: I played this multiplayer Jenga game in this hall and just dove in, and it does not feel like real everyday stuff. I mean, I definitely feel like it's a little squishier, but it almost feels like, honestly, like a pattern of fingers are kind of like poking into your hand, putting a sort of a pattern of sensation. That's because those 133 areas, maybe that doesn't map to all of the individual touch areas that are on your hand, but they combined a [00:01:30] crate sense and it gets really creepy because when you feel something on your palm, it really feels like there's weight. The other thing that's weird is when a finger touches, you actually felt like intimately creepy. When the person next to me virtually touched my hand, I feel like I thought, or I touched hers. I thought I'd, I thought I'd like, you know, touched her hand.
Speaker 1: I wanted to apologize, but it was virtual. So there's a lot of fascinating applications for this. It could be industrial or Craig, so sort of presence. This company is also making a more compact version that's less expensive, that's meant to be even better and also have a sort of vibrational tactic sensation [00:02:00] for textures That's coming out later this year. So I'm kind of getting my feet wet in this version of the haptics. What I can say is it's really the high watermark for where I'd like that type of future metaverse sensation to be. But you know, getting this massive compressor box and putting on these gloves, you know, no, I'm not gonna do that. You won't either, but it shows what could be or what people are dreaming of happening. This technology's not perfect. In fact, midway through I seem to have this bizarre broken finger that s sprouted up.
Speaker 1: It freaked the heck outta me. My finger [00:02:30] looked all the way bent back, and I didn't know what to do about it. My finger wasn't actually bent. But the creepiest heck thing was that as I used things and moved around, that bent back finger had sensations that I could feel on my own finger. So it was like I transplanted my finger to the back of my hand. It kind of rebroke and fixed itself. But I mean, that was trippy. And so what do you think about haptic feedback? Does it creep you out? Does it fascinate you? What do you wanna see in the future of interactions? Anyway, [00:03:00] if you have thoughts about it, let us know in the comments. Make sure to like and subscribe. Thanks for watching.
