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Virtual Reality, Now with the Sense of Touch THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING Virtual Reality, Now With the Sense of Touch By Sarah E. Needleman April 3, 2018 10:06 a.m. ET The future depicted in the new film ‘Ready Player One’ is closer than you think: Startups are developing haptic gloves and suits that let users feel virtual worlds. A scene from Steven Spielberg’s ‘Ready Player One,’ in which haptic technology allows the characters to feel and manipulate virtual objects. Photo: Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros It was a starry night on the cartoonish virtual-reality farm I was exploring with help from HTC Corp.’s Vive headset. Suddenly a tiny fox emerged from behind the barn and leapt onto my hand. I was surprised by the animal’s realistic appearance—and also by the sensation of its tiny paws as they walked a circle in my palm. In addition to the headset, I wore a bulky black glove from HaptX Inc., a six-year-old startup. Thick wires arched over the fingers and controlled the airflow to more than 100 inflatable pockets embedded in the glove’s mesh lining, which created sensations of touch and even texture on my skin. After a few seconds, the virtual fox leapt out of my hand and paused. I stroked its fur and felt soft strands brushing past my fingertips. 1 Haptic technology uses force, vibration and motion to simulate the feel of a virtual object. A basic version—responsible for the pulsing feedback found in smartphones, fitness bands and video-game controllers—has been around for years. But adding the sensation of touch to virtual reality has, until recently, been the stuff of science fiction. Haptics feature heavily in Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One,” in theaters now. The story unfolds in the wake of an energy crisis caused by climate change that has devastated Earth. The characters spend most of their time in the Oasis, a glittering pre-apocalyptic metaverse where virtual-reality visors and haptic gloves allow them to do almost everything except eat and drink. “Ready Player One” is set in 2045, but some haptic gear—bulkier and less advanced than the Hollywood version—is already on the market. Experts expect these devices and others in development to influence a variety of industries, from health care to interior design, while boosting demand for the headsets they support. “Touch adds a missing dimension to VR, cementing a physical link between the user and the virtual world,” says David Parisi, the author of “Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing With Haptics from Electricity to Computing” and an associate professor of emerging media at the College of Charleston. “Even the most impressive sights and sounds can get us only so far.” In October 2017, Hardlight VR Inc. released a $300 haptic jacket lined with motors that produce sensations across the chest and arms for more than 30 virtual-reality video games. With the jacket on, a gamer can feel an opponent’s virtual sword “entering” their chest and “exiting” through their back. “It’s much more intuitive than a notification popping up on your screen telling you that you’ve been hit,” says Hardlight co-founder Morgan Sinko. “You know it happened because you felt it.” HaptX, the maker of the glove I tested, is developing a full-body haptic suit that will enable a person’s virtual-reality avatar to simulate their movements. Users in different physical locations will be able to occupy the same virtual space and feel like they’re in a room together, says Jake Rubin, a co-founder of HaptX. The company has raised more than $10 million from investors, including former Twitter Inc. CEO Dick Costolo and Walt Disney Co. executive Jon Snoddy. The bodysuit is still in Hardlight VR Inc.’s haptic jacket the early prototype phase; an updated version of the brings sensations to videogames. gloves I tested will start shipping to about 20 enterprise Photo: hardlight vr and government customers later this year. 2 Sex-related haptic gear will be among the most plentiful at first, says Sarah Jamie Lewis, a former security engineer for Amazon.com Inc. who is now an independent researcher focused on privacy, anonymity and sex tech. “The sex industry tends to drive a lot of adoption, as it does with all technology,” she says. Virtual sex-simulation software is already on the market, and Lewis expects new programs to be developed for haptic-enhanced sex acts. “We are already seeing Haptic gloves from the startup Haptx Inc. hobbyist implementations of such devices,” she allow users to ’touch’ virtual objects. says, including anatomical sleeves, vibrators and Photo: hardlight vr blankets that simulate an embrace. Some companies hope to add temperature controls to haptic devices, allowing users to feel warmth and cold associated with virtual objects. South Korean startup TEGway Co. has developed a flexible thermoelectric module with a temperature range of 40 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit and recently partnered with a haptic glove maker in Florida. This could lead to practical and even life-saving applications, according to Munjeet Singh, vice president of immersive computing at Booz Allen Hamilton Corp. Imagine if a first responder in training could feel the viscosity and warmth of a victim’s blood in a virtual simulation, he says. A multisensory simulation could prevent newcomers from fainting on the job—a common reaction, according to Singh, who adds that his firm’s clients include branches of the U.S. military hoping to use haptic gear to train new recruits. We’re still a long way from the vision of “Ready Player One,” in which an entire population occupies a touch-enabled virtual metaverse. To achieve that kind of wide adoption, virtual-reality headsets will have to be as ubiquitous as smartphones, says Gene Munster, an analyst at Loup Ventures. Consumers bought only about four million headsets in 2017, but Munster predicts that sales will more than triple this year and cross the 100 million mark by 2023. “Once we surpass that point, we’ll see the market for peripherals like haptics take off,” he says. “Then the stuff of science fiction becomes reality.” SOURCE: https://www.wsj.com/articles/virtual-reality-now-with-the-sense-of-touch-1522764377?shareToken =st37812414908c475bac3be005a235e5c3&reflink=article_email_share 3.
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