This is arguably one of the best Kickstarter videos we have seen in some time. Not just because the technology is cool (we will elaborate more on that shortly), but because they focused on the emotional response; the experiential benefit of virtual reality and haptics control. When the man at the desk takes off his HMD to nostalgically reflect on a childhood memory he just re-experienced – that’s VR. So first, congratulations on showcasing an understated yet effective example of bringing VR to the human level and helping throw away the imagery of inexplicably excited people wearing scuba gear on their heads.
Now the gloves! Their secret sauce are ten haptics attenuators spread across your fingers that vibrate at different frequencies to emulate the sensation of touch in virtual reality. We have not tried this yet, but we are hopeful that it will be enough to get sense of shape and texture in virtual reality environments. In addition to the haptics, the gloves need to be supplemented by a Leap Motion tracker which is placed on the front of the HMD to do your hands’ skeletal tracking, and each glove has a built in IMU to supplement this for further accuracy.
Gloveone with Leap Motion
Up until now, the gloves we have seen are dependent on internal tracking and haptics was non-existent. Perhaps by working with Leap Motion, Gloveone is able to dramatically reduce the pricing, and leave the tracking to companies with more tenure and economies of scale.
Gloveone has a live Kickstarter now and has already raised $60,000 towards their goal of $150,000. We really want to try these things out for ourselves!