The Sense Glove resembles a large, skeletal hand into which the users slides their own, while also fastening attachments to their fingers. CEO Gijs den Butter explained how it works.
“So basically, Sense Glove enables touch in virtual reality,” den Butter said. “It does it with force feedback, so you actually are restricted when you’re trying to grasp an object, and with haptic feedback, so you get a little tactile sensation when for example you’re touching hard or slippery objects.”
It’s a tantalizing prospect for game designers looking to develop more visceral VR experiences, but den Butter is focused on satisfying needs of a more mundane variety.
“We use it mainly, currently for B2B (business-to-business) training purposes. So you have to think of training workers on an assembly line. It’s really expensive to hold an assembly line just for training purposes, but in VR you can build it as real as possible, and with our Sense Glove, the interaction with the virtual objects are just as if touching real objects, almost.”
The Sense Glove is a remarkable advancement over the typical controllers bundled with VR headsets, with may track the movement of the user’s hands, but don’t offer any real sense of touch beyond rumbling.
Consumers hoping to acquire a Sense Glove may need to wait a bit. The device is still in the prototype stage. Den Butter plans to have a development kit out in June 2018. Those kits are currently available for pre-order.
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