In my long streak of articles about my hands-on at AWE 2021 (I hope you are liking them!), today I want to tell you about my experience with HaptX, which was one of the most remarkable of my whole event!
HaptX Gloves
If you have been in the VR ecosystem for many years like me, probably you remember AxonVR, a company that was working on a complex enterprise system for offering full-body VR. Its concept photos were super-cool to be seen and showed a machine that let you walk in the air to walk naturally in VR. After a while, that company pivoted, changed its name to HaptX, and decided to work on something a bit more ordinary, like VR gloves. And it started doing that in another super-cool way.
HaptX focused since the beginning on trying to offer a believable touch sensation for your hands in VR: while all the other companies, in the consumer and enterprise market, offered the sense of touch through vibration, HaptX worked on a system made out of little inflatable balls inside the glove, that could give the sense of touch in every specific part of your hand. The sense of touch was so available for the first time on all the surface of your palm and fingers, and with the possibility of feeling the sense of touch in every single part of them. The gloves also provided force-feedback, so they also applied some force to your fingers to simulate the force applied by the virtual objects to your hands. The first version of the gloves was incredibly big and heavy, and all journalists that tried them reported that the device was incredibly innovative, but also very bulky and uncomfortable to wear for a long period. The price was also through the roof and the device was devoted to big companies and the military, especially for training purposes.
HaptX has recently developed a new version of the gloves, which is a huge improvement over the previous one: the entire system has been re-engineered, and the gloves are now lighter, more comfortable, and less expensive. At AWE 2021, these gloves have made their first public appearance in an exhibition, and I have been incredibly happy to finally be able to try them because I have always been curious to try this haptic sensation that everyone defined as being unique in its genre.
Here below you find everything I discovered trying HaptX gloves for a few minutes: and remember, these are just my first impressions after a few minutes of usage, and doesn’t count as a full review that would require me to use the gloves for at least a few hours inside different applications.
HaptX Gloves hands-on
At the HaptX booth, I have been able to try the gloves on the last day of AWE. Thanks to all the team at HaptX, especially Joe and Jake, for this. (By the way, Jake is a Patron of my blog… this has no influence on whatever I am writing in this article, but I think it’s fair that I disclose this to you)
Wearing the gloves has not been immediate like donning the Senseglove Nova, but it has not been that long or complicated like it was wearing the first version of them (at least, from what I can tell by the articles I have read). Some people from the company measured my hands, so that to input the parameters into the runtime of the system, then they made me wear some disposable cotton gloves inside to guarantee my hygiene. For sure the hands may sweat a lot while being inside this kind of big gloves, so I’ve found the idea of making me wear cotton gloves a pretty good one: I like companies that care about hygiene at their booths. After that, a person from the HaptX team helped me in putting the hands inside the gloves, I adjusted a bit the fit on the fingers (especially on the fingertip), and then he secured the gloves to my hands and my wrist by closing three knobs. Wearing them has been pretty easy with the help of another person: I expected the operation to last various minutes, while maybe it was around one-two minutes to wear both gloves. I asked HaptX if it is possible to wear them without the help of another person, and they told me that when you use them every day, you learn how to wear them alone, too.
The ergonomics also didn’t feel bad. I mean, there were some downsides: the gloves are still a bit big and a bit stiff, and wearing them I had not the sensation I could move my hands and fingers freely however I wanted. Especially because the gloves are not limited to your hands, but they extend to the first part of your forearm, so the movements of the wrist become a bit limited. Plus, both gloves have a big tube coming out from the back and that makes you stay tethered to a big box. But notwithstanding all of this, it is better than it seems in the picture. In my experience of a few minutes, I had no arm strain from using these devices, and I have not felt a big discomfort. I mean, I felt my movements limited, I have felt that I had something bulky attached to my hands… and probably I wouldn’t be able to wear them for four hours straight, but in my few minutes of testing, I have not felt a big sensation of discomfort that made me want to remove the gloves or something like that. I remember the reviewers of the first version talking about the big weight of the gloves… well, this problem is not here anymore, the gloves are not lightweight, but not super heavy either. Let’s put it this way: they are bulky and tethered, but now acceptable for a short session performed by a prosumer/enthusiast (not for the average consumer, like, at all).
The gloves also look pretty cool to wear and make you feel like a cyborg or an evil mastermind from the future. I’ve found the design, together with the choice of the material and the black color, to be pretty elegant. What is annoying, in my opinion, is the fact that these gloves require a big tube that goes from every glove to a box that must sit on the desk at which you are trying the VR application. This is necessary to provide the special haptic sensation I described you before, but it limits a lot the usability and the portability of the device. For instance, I was required to stay in a particular position of the HaptX booth to try the gloves because that was the position of the box, and so I had more freedom of movement by staying there. The box is already smaller than the first version, but in my opinion, it is still too big.
Let me explain a bit better how HaptX technology works so that you understand a bit more why the box is needed. HaptX provides haptic sensations on the hand using compressed air. Imagine that the internal surface of the gloves is made with pluriball… yes, that kind of little plastic balls that we all love to pop. Imagine something like this, just smaller and better. The little balls of the pluriball are all deflated in the beginning, then when you have to feel the sense of touch on a particular part of your hand, e.g. the fingertip of the index finger, the balls of that part gets inflated. The balls, inflating, gets bigger, and so they touch your skin, giving you the sense of touch. Even better, if they are inflated a lot, they also exert some pressure on your skin, so you can also have a sense of pressure of virtual objects on your hand. Controlling which balls to inflate and how much to inflate them, the system can give you a big set of nuanced haptic sensations on all parts of your hand. The big box and the controlling circuitry that you have on the glove are necessary to pump air with enough pressure and to control where exactly this air is going to, so which little balls have exactly to be inflated. Miniaturizing an air compressor together with the control logic is not an easy task, that’s why the box and the attached tubes are still a bit big. Clarified this, let’s return to my impressions about the devices.
I took a bit of time to make confidence with the gloves and to shoot some photos for my social media (eh, the vanity), and then I wore a Vive Pro headset and I was put inside the main demo of HaptX gloves, the one that you see in all trailers by HaptX.
The Playground demo has been studied to let you feel all the possible sensations that these gloves can give you. You see a little cartoon world in front of you, and you can perform some actions that trigger both the haptic and the force-feedback system. You can squeeze clouds and make them emit drops of water, you can have a little cute fox go on your hand and walk over it, you can harvest wheat, and do other things of this kind… and in the end, when it finishes, some confettis come down from the sky. It is pretty cute and effective… for sure better than trying the usual enterprise demo.
As I’ve said, HaptX gloves provide both force-feedback and haptic feedback. Force-feedback means that the glove can replicate the forces that should be applied by the virtual objects to your hands if the objects were real: for instance, if you are holding a ball in VR, the force-feedback gloves prevent your real fingers from entering inside the virtual ball, because they replicate the physics force that the surface of the ball would exert on your fingers when you push them towards its surface. Or if in VR you are squeezing a rubber ball, force feedback makes sure that you have more difficulty in closing your fingers, because it stimulates the resistance of the ball material. Force feedback is usually exerted by strings or motors that pull the fingertips and prevent you from pushing them further from the current position. The strings below the big rubber slices that you see around my fingers in the photos and videos in this article are for the force feedback: for instance, they pulled my fingers back to simulate the sensation of the stiffness of the clouds while I was squeezing them.
I have to say that force-feedback in these gloves didn’t excite me: I mean, it was decent at the same level as Senseglove Nova, and probably a bit worse than the Dexmo Gloves. It’s good to have this sense of force being applied to my fingers, it improves the sense of immersion, but usually, it is not precise enough to feel completely believable. It usually arrives with a little delay, and also the amount of strength on the different fingers is different from the one that should be, so for instance my fingers are blocked in a different pose than the one they would have had if the virtual object I was holding were real. So, it is better than not having it, but it is not superior to one of the competitors and there’s still a lot of work to do to make it believable.
The sense of haptic sensation on the skin, instead, is of another league if compared to the one of everything else I have tried in my career in VR. It’s incredibly cool, and I think that if you have the occasion to try it, you must do it because it’s difficult to understand it by just reading some words… I’ll do my best, but it won’t be enough. You can feel the sensation of being touched in every little part of your palm and your fingers (not also on the back). The first thing I’ve tried has been the rain: I put my hand under it, and when the drops touched my skin, I could feel the sensation of being touched exactly at those points. Another cool moment was when a little cute fox jumped on my hand: she walked on it, and I could feel exactly all her steps on my palm. And when the spider came on my hand, oh wow, that felt disgusting… all those tiny legs walking on me, and I could feel them all! But one of the best moments, that showed me the power of this technology, happened in the end: when the confetti fell from the sky in the end, one of them dropped on my index fingertip, then I tilted my hand, and it started rolling down my hand, going down my finger, then on my palm, then on the edge of the palm, until it fell to the floor. Believe me, I could feel exactly where that confetti was without even looking at it, I could feel it sliding down as if it were real: at that moment, my sense of presence went over 9000 because it was so believable. You can’t have this kind of sensation with whatever other device there is now in the market.
Beware anyway that the sensation of being touched is not exactly as you expect it to be: little inflatable balls can’t give you the same pressure or the same sensation on the skin of real objects. In fact, the touch sensation felt more like little pop rocks candies popping on my skin, or if you prefer, like very tiny electrical shocks, or something slightly stingy touching me. Don’t misunderstand me, it is not unpleasant, but it is not like being touched by a real object, and of course, since the “pluriball” has a limited set of balls, you don’t feel haptics on every micrometer of your skin, but the haptic sensation is “digitized” to the locations of the (many, but not infinite) inflatable balls. This means that the haptic sensation is ideal for little objects touching you and even better, slightly hitting you, as the little legs of the fox or the drops of the rain than objects that touch a big portion of the skin at the same time, like a sphere staying still on your palm. And in fact, the Playground demo is good in showing you exactly the kind of sensations that these gloves are ideal in re-creating. So it’s not a perfectly realistic touch sensation, but one that is good for some kind of experiences, and okay-ish for other ones…, but in all scenarios, it is for sure much better than the vibrational feedback we are used to. Haptics is still in the early stages, and this is probably the best that it is possible to obtain in this moment of technology.
When the demo ended, I was kind of sad, because I was having so much fun trying the haptic sensation that I wanted more. Damn other people that were in line at the booth lol 🙂
Final impressions
I can say without any doubt that HaptX has been one of the best three demos that I have tried at AWE, and one of the most innovative devices that I’ve tried in the last times. I’m not saying that this product is perfect: haptics have still a long road to go, and this device is full of things to improve: it is bulky, it is very expensive (the price is undisclosed but above $10K), the force feedback is just decent, the haptic sensation is not exactly like in real life. But this company is trying to do something new, something different, something cool, and these gloves are pretty unique in the market (I mean, let’s see what Meta wants to do, but for now they are unique in the market). The haptic sensation that these gloves offer is amazing, and for the first time you can really feel something touching you in different parts of your hand, you can feel tiny objects touching your skin, you can feel objects moving on your hand. This feels pretty magical, and in the moments it fits well with the virtual object that is touching your virtual hand, it increases a lot the sense of presence.
I will keep looking with interest at HaptX: now the gloves are big and expensive and are targeted at the enterprise market, but I hope that in the future the company could evolve them into something at least for prosumers. I’m not so convinced that gloves in VR can enter the mass market (they have friction and hygiene problems), but I think they can have a good number of people interested in them, and I would personally love to have a pair at home to use with certain sensorial experiences. I hope that HaptX can do that… maybe in the usual 5-10 years we always talk about. Good luck with that 🙂