With devices like the Oculus Rift, gamers are already experiencing a more immersive form of gameplay where their view is the entire game and its world, as opposed to just staring at a computer monitor or TV. However it seems in a bid to make these games feel even more realistic, an engineering team at Rice University have created a glove that allows gamers to “feel” objects within the game.
Dubbed the Hands Omni glove, the device relies on haptic feedback to provide gamer with the feeling of touching something inside the game. According to one of the students working on the project, Thor Walker, “What we’ve made is a glove that uses air to inflate bladders underneath your fingers. So you can hook this up to a video game and when you reach out and grab a virtual object, it feels like you’re actually grabbing that object.”
That being said it seems that the Hands Omni is still in its prototype phase at the moment and does not look like it is ready to be rolled out to the masses just yet. We have to admit that we are curious as to how much more this will add to the gaming experience, and if it will allow gamers to actually feel what they’re touching, or is it more of a haptic feedback to acknowledge that they’ve touched something?
However it is still a pretty clever idea but like we said, the team admits that there is still a lot more work left to be done before it is ready for consumers. In the meantime if you’d like to see the glove in action, check it out in the video above.
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