Hapto Brings Real Haptic Feeling To Your Hands In VR

[kcarbotte]

Hapto is a new peripheral that takes haptic feedback to a new level. Forget rumble motors and linear resonant actuators; Hapto features mechanical “pushers” that replicate the feeling of physical objects.

Hapto Brings Real Haptic Feeling To Your Hands In VR : Read more

 

[cryoburner]

I like the idea of feedback devices that provide more accurate touch sensations, but this implementation seems like it would need a lot of work. For one, it looks rather unwieldy. Those controllers would make it impossible to hold a headset's standard motion controllers at the same time, so you would be reliant on games supporting its limited four-button controls. Those buttons seem kind of awkwardly positioned as well, not actually under your fingertips, but under the base of your fingers.

And since there's nothing under your fingertips, that means there would be no haptic feedback of any sort applied to your fingertips. When you pick up or touch an object, you'll typically be doing so more with your fingers than with the palms of your hands. And for larger objects that might potentially press against your palms, the device provides no way of restricting your movement to prevent you from clipping through them. How does one get the impression that they are touching a larger object when their hands pass right through it? In order to prevent such clipping though, you would need to physically restrict movement of the arms, which would likely mean some form of over-shoulder robotic exoskeleton, which might not be entirely practical for home use. So a device like this really should focus more on providing feedback to the fingertips for small-object interactions more than anything.

Additionally, this device is something that will almost certainly require developer support to function, and it doesn't exactly look like a feature that would be particularly simple to implement well in a game. The game needs to simulate the feel of objects, and that's going to be more complicated than just performing a bunch of collision checks with their 3D models. You would also likely need to assign special material properties to objects, since, for example, a fluffy dog shouldn't feel the same as a statue of a fluffy dog.

I just can't see this device getting any developer support beyond a handful of tech demos, and as such, I can't really see it taking off. For a touch feedback device like this, something like a more-flexible glove format with smaller "pushers" would probably work better.