Meta’s Sci-fi Haptic Glove: Gloves to restore the sense of touch in any virtual space! Yes, you heard it right! Meta hopes the haptic glove will lessen the gap between the real world and the virtual world.

Meta, formerly called Facebook, is known for its famed forays into augmented and virtual reality. It has been discreetly working on one of its most ambitious projects for the past seven years: a haptic glove that can reproduce a range of sensations like grasping an object or running the hand along the surface, including texture, pressure, and vibrations.

The Sci-fi Haptic Glove, unveiled by meta-reality labs with reality labs director Sean Keller, is lined with a series of small air pockets called actuators along with the palms and fingers that inflate to create a sense of touch.

Meta’s prototype tactile glove combines pneumatic and electrical actuators to swiftly inflate small air pockets in the fingers and palm of the glove, employing soft robotics concepts. These actuators are miniature motors that produce a tactile sensation or sense of pressure.

Commercializing a haptic glove is the objective of Meta to transform into a metaverse- a collective virtual shared space featuring avatars of real people.

According to the Meta spokesperson, the glove is currently a mere research prototype still in the development stage, and no release date has been announced.