A pair of gloves capable of transferring virtual sensations into reality: this is the latest fascinating “confession” of the men working on the Metaverse project
Meta is working non-stop on the creation of the Metaverse, the ambitious and extremely complicated project that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the former Facebook and Meta, unveiled to the world a few weeks ago. In development there are a pair of gloves that allow anyone to “touch” what will be in the Metaverse, getting real sensations.
The intention is clear: to pave the way for machine-enhanced reality, servers, computers, artificial intelligence and so on, reducing the gap that exists between the sphere of the real and the virtual. The implications of such an object, a glove that allows you to touch the Metaverse, are almost endless since Zuckerberg has defined it as a real virtual universe: you could, for example, experience in real life the feeling you get from touching a pair of virtual shoes, or caressing the hand of another person. Fascinating of course, but, to hear the stories of the Meta men working on the project, not at all simple.
How the Metaverso gloves work
“We use our hands to communicate with others, to know the world and to interact with it. If we could make the sensations experienced with virtual hands real in augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR), people could touch, feel and interact with virtual objects in the same way as they do with real ones, all without anyone being asked to learn new ways to interact,” said Sean Keller, the director of Meta’s Reality Labs division.
It sounds simple, but it’s really not. The gestation of the gloves has taken and will still take quite some time because the challenge faced by the designers is ambitious to say the least. The gloves to touch the Metaverse integrate miniaturized motors distributed throughout the accessory and are governed by algorithms that in turn transform into “mechanical” instructions the actions performed in the virtual.
At the base of everything there is simple air, which is “pumped” by the motors in the actuators at different intensities to replicate in real life the sensations experienced in the virtual. It’s all very complex because Meta’s hope is that one day the actuators that create the haptic “feedback” can work in harmony with the hand tracking technologies on the gloves, which allow computers to know exactly the position of the hand in order to insert it into a virtual scene.
They will serve the technologies of the future
For example, with the gloves developed by Meta it will be possible to perceive in real time the weight of a virtual object, perhaps while pulling it to oneself. A fascinating project, that however, for its complexity, is still far from the full realization: Meta’s designers are still refining the hand tracking technology and the actuators that realize the tactile sensation. Keller made no secret of the difficulties: “Some of the technology needed to deliver believable sensations doesn’t yet exist.”