Facebook’s new haptic gloves allow you to feel things in the metaverse

[ad_1]
On Tuesday evening, Meta, the company first known as Facebook, made a supposedly exciting announcement: a glove. But not just any glove. It is a haptic glove equipped with a small motor that uses air explosions to mimic the sense of touch, and it seems like a portable nightmare.
There is no need to misunderstand Meta in the 21st century Power Glove which allows you to feel digital objects. Apparently, the company has been working on the project for seven years, and the team it is building is thinking about at least a decade in the future. The glove is less nervous than the wristband Facebook announced earlier this year (the company points out that it is a wristband). it doesn’t read your mind). But it is becoming increasingly clear, even with its shiny new name, that Meta metaverse, a virtual space for working and walking through avatars, is struggling to become more accessible — and so frightening — to ordinary humans.
Some people like this weird handmade outfit. Built by Meta Reality Labs, the prototype haptic glove is designed to work with future virtual reality systems. Today most VR headsets operate in the conference with controllers equipped with joysticks and buttons. Meta Quest and Quest 2, Reality Labs more products as well providing hands-free monitoring without controllers, which uses a camera’s headset and computer visual algorithms to interpret what your hands are doing and return that movement to the virtual world. So for now, when you make the move to pick an apple in VR, your hands shouldn’t feel the sensation of holding the apple.
Enter: glove. Meta’s haptic glove prototype uses the principles of soft robotics and uses pneumatic and electroactive actuators to quickly inflate small air pockets in the fingers and palm of the glove. These actuators are basically tiny motors that can cause a feeling of pressure and therefore touch. The idea of this is that if Meta inserted a haptic glove into these thousands of actuators and combined those sensations with the visual input of a VR headset or augmented reality glasses that project digital images into the real world, the user could approach and feel them. virtual objects. With gloves like this, you may one day shake your hand at someone else’s avatar in the metaverse and feel tight.
Meta didn’t invent haptic clothes. There are several companies that make haptic vests, pants and even more Complete costumes that resemble the costumes of Marvel superheroes on drums. There have been a number of haptic clothing articles since the early 1990s, similar to the metaberse term coined by author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science fiction novel. Snow Accident. Haptic gloves were of paramount importance in Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel First player ready, as well as in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation. Around 2021 in the real world, the majority of people who use such technology are serious players with money. A haptic vest that will fit you in 40 different places on your body, such as It costs $ 500.
It’s worth noting that VR has historically been a realm of serious players, and that’s a potential problem for Meta and its grand plan for metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone to use his metaverse products, similarly Nearly 3,000 billion people use Facebook, does himself no favors by bowing to the science fiction inventions created by his Reality Labs.
Haptic clothing is a futuristic concept, but it is also very rare and potentially invasive. Would you like Meta (read: Facebook) to record data about your body movements with a special glove or to scan your brain waves with a wristband? Yes, Meta Quest is a hands-on tracking technology collects and stores data about your movements. This seems innocent enough if you are playing a round Beat Saber is a popular VR game in your living room. It’s more worrying when you imagine a world where you do a large part of computing through VR headphones or AR glasses, which is basically what Zuckerberg thinks will be like the future of the Internet.
And there are many reasons to believe that it is a metaverse It might be nice to live through a pair of glasses connected to the internet. Meanwhile, immersive VR technologies are becoming increasingly useful for more and more off-the-shelf applications. Meta Reality Labs unveiled its prototype haptic glove on the same day as the Food and Drug Administration he allowed a VR system to treat chronic pain. And this isn’t even the first VR treatment to get FDA approval this year.
You could say that Meta’s haptic glove is another distraction, unlike Facebook changing its name to Meta in the midst of a historically bad scandal and ensuring that everyone would talk about the metaverse in the coming weeks.
It is reminiscent of another Facebook announcement, which arrived a few days before the name was changed. In mid-October, Reality Labs said it would launch a research project examine the footage for thousands of hours filmed from a first-person perspective to train models of artificial intelligence. Included in that dataset was a video taken by Facebook’s smart glasses Ray-Bans equipped with a camera. The company is calling the Ego4D data set and will open it to researchers around the world this month.
Do you think this project is nice and important to build a meta-verse to Meta’s plan, where people who wear smart glasses may want to know what a computer is looking at? Of course. It seems worrying, at best, for the company to train how to see robots, that company he wants to own a large part of the metaverse, The next generation of the Internet – that’s the same business a lot say yes destroys democracy? He does so.
This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. Register here not to miss the next one!
[ad_2]
Source link