Could these VR haptic gloves replace human touch?

We’re seeing a substantial turn towards online social interaction replacing in-person social interaction — especially among the younger generations. That was exacerbated and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. But mountains of research show that physical touch is critical to a person’s mental wellbeing and online interactions haven’t been able to provide that. One solution may come in the form of haptic gloves that give a sense of contact in virtual reality (VR).

We’ve seen many different experimental haptic feedback gloves developed for use in VR, but this is the first we’ve come across created explicitly to simulate the human-to-human physical contact that we’re lacking in virtual spaces. Its developers from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering state in their paper that the system is ideal for “real-time, bi-directional social touch communication among physically distant users.”

That comes in the form of a pair of long gloves that extend up the wearer’s forearms, almost to their elbows. Each glove has 26 vibrotactile actuators (eccentric rotating mass motors) across its surface and an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board controls those according to commands sent by a computer hosting a Unity 3D VR environment, rendered through Meta Quest VR headsets. The Arduino controls the vibrotactile actuators through PWM (pulse-width modulation) shields, so it can vary the intensity of the feedback to match the VR interaction.

That interaction might be something like a VR handshake or high five. It could occur during a VR business meeting or in a more casual VR setting.

Testing by the researchers showed an overall positive response from participating subjects, but that has limited utility in determining what kind of effect this technology would have in the real world. To that end, the team has a goal of releasing this as an open-source project in the future.

Image credit: P. Banerjee et al.