A smart glove that zaps the back of your hand makes it feel like you are grasping objects in virtual reality, by sending electrical signals to nerves in your palms.
To accompany the visual experience of holding something in VR, people often wear gloves that provide feedback directly to the palm, like vibrations or electrical signals. But gloves can also dull finger sensation, making it harder to perform dexterous tasks when wearing a VR headset.
Now, Yudai Tanaka at the University of Chicago and his colleagues have developed a device that uses a web of electrodes on the backs of the hand and fingers to simulate or enhance the sense of touch, leaving the palm and fingers unobstructed to perform activities.
The nerve stimulation makes individual fingers feel as if they are touching something because there are more touch receptors on the front of our hands that pick up the electrical signals sent by the electrodes than there are on the back.
The team tried the device on several VR experiences that combined real physical and virtual aspects, such as adding feedback to virtual climbing blocks, enhancing the sensation of moulding real clay into a virtual bear and allowing a person to feel a climbing rope more keenly on their palm as they scaled it in VR.
Tanaka and his colleagues think the glove will also be useful for learning tasks in physical reality. They tried it for DJing, where it gave feedback to guide someone on when to fade a particular music track in or out.
Because it doesn’t cover the whole hand, it could be worn all the time and used inside and outside VR, says Tanaka.
“When we look at our lifestyles, in our actual everyday lives, we are not in VR, we take trains, you know, we run and we grab handles, or sometimes we DJ. Different types of interactions that are integrated into their lives,” says Tanaka. “So, I’m very interested in how haptic feedback can be friendly to our lifestyle.”
He presented the work at the 2023 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany.
Cheryl Metcalf at the University of Southampton, UK, agrees that the device could be used to help people get better at physical tasks like DJing, but she thinks it might be difficult to recreate the exact sensations of touch through the back of the hand.
“To grasp a virtual cup of tea, for example, you’re going to want to feel a solid pressure on the fingertips, on the palm, on the thumb, and down the length of some of the fingers,” says Metcalf.
Reference: Newscientist.com
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