bHaptics, the Korean company focused on providing consumer-oriented haptic devices, has announced the launch of a new product of its suite: TactGlove, a wireless glove to provide haptic feedback.
bHaptics
bHaptics is a startup that offers a suite of products to provide haptic feedback. These products are all modules to give you vibrational feedback on a different part of the body. There is for instance:
- A suit for the torso
- Some bracelets for the arms and the ankles
- Some mittens for the hands
- A facemask for the head
There are a few nice things I appreciate about the bHaptics solution:
- It is fully modular. You just buy the devices relative to the parts of the body on which you want to feel the haptic feedback, and nothing more. All of them are independent the one from the other, so you can just have one of them and enjoy the feedback only on that part of the body;
- All parts are wireless and work via Bluetooth, so you don’t have to mess with cables;
- It is fully cross-platform and works with SteamVR, Vive Focus, Oculus Quest 2, etc…
- The price is consumer-oriented. Che cheapest haptic suit for the torso is priced at $300, which is not a very high price.
To enjoy the haptic feedback, the VR experience you play must have implemented the bHaptics SDK, and luckily bHaptics has managed to get developers to implement it in more than 100 games. We of New Technology Walkers have implemented it into our game HitMotion: Reloaded, too, and we had a very positive experience with it.
The company provided us with the hardware, the haptic patterns (thanks Alex VR!), and the SDK (that worked very well), and we integrated the system in a very short time. The result is that our game is so much better with haptics than without, so we are happy about it. It has been one of the best companies we have collaborated with as developers.
bHaptics announces TactGlove
bHaptics has just announced that it will add a new device to its modular solution: TactGlove, a pair of gloves to provide you with haptic feedback on your fingers. The difference with the other bHaptics devices for the hands, which are called Tactosy, is that Tactosy is like a mitten you put around the back of your hand to feel a vibration on all your hand (e.g. it is ideal to feel the feedback of a punch), while TactGlove is meant to let you feel fine-grained vibrations on your fingertips (e.g. it is ideal to make you feel the feedback of a moving fish your grab with your fingers).
Tactglove, exactly like all the other bHaptics devices, is wireless and works with a battery installed on the back of the wrist. Haptic feedback is provided thanks to small LRA (Linear Resonant Actuator) motors installed on the fingertips. The gloves are made in light and stretch fabric, and come with a set of inner gloves, which can be easily washed and replaced so that to guarantee the hygiene of the user over multiple usages.
You may be noticing that I’ve mentioned no hand-tracking hardware: competitors like Senseglove Nova or HaptX Gloves all have some integrated sensors to detect the pose of the fingers and use some external systems (e.g. Vive Tracker) to get the overall pose of the hand. Here there is nothing of this kind, and it is the secret to keep the device comfortable and at a low price. Since the gloves are just made of fabric, the hands keep their natural exterior shape, so the integrated hand tracking system of the VR headset you may be using, like the Oculus Quest 2, is still able to reliably track the hands, and there is no need of additional tracking sensors. This has been a smart decision: you just need a Quest 2 with hand tracking integrated, a glove that is similar to a standard glove, and you have haptic feedback for your hands! Of course, this approach also has its drawbacks: the gloves can only be used with headsets providing hand tracking support (so no Rift S for instance) and can only reliably work when your hands are tracked by the headset (so you can’t have haptic feedback behind your head for instance). But for the most common consumer cases, these should be acceptable compromises.
The company plans to provide TactGlove DK Kits starting in the 2nd quarter of 2022, then officially release the consumer version in late 2022. The product is manufactured in partnership with SEES Global Inc., the “No.1 global manufacturer of industrial safety and sports leisure gloves” (according to bHaptics). The expected retail price is $299, with the gloves coming in 3 sizes: Medium, Large, and Extra Large.
As for the content, experiences have to implement TactGlove feedback into the source code to provide finger-level vibrational feedback. bHaptics partnered with Unplugged: Air Guitar and Hand Physics Lab to showcase TactGlove at CES 2022, and we can expect more titles to come in the future.
UPDATE (2022.01.07): bHaptics TactGlove gloves don’t work only with Quest 2: I have seen a video from CES where they are used together with Ultraleap v2 hands tracking device.
Hands-on impressions
I have had the opportunity of going hands-on with the current version of TactGlove at AWE 2021. It was just a quick test, so I can’t provide you with a reliable review, but it was enough to be able to have a first impression of them. It was fun that since TactGlove was unannounced yet, they were not publicly available in the booth, but I have been told by the company they had them for private demos… so I approached the guy at the booth and I whispered “I know you have gloves”: at that point, he took a secret box from a shelf in the booth and showcased them to me. I felt like a secret agent trading military materials lol.
I was offered the opportunity of having a short demo session. I wore them in a super-easy way, exactly like if they were standard gloves. The comfort was good, and I could just feel that in every finger the fingertip was a bit stiffer than usual because there was the motor there. The materials seemed of good quality and also the production quality was high, like in all other bHaptics products. I wore a Quest 2 and was shown some demos, where for instance I could pet a cat or play with some fishes in an aquarium: they were quite simple, but enough to showcase the vibrational feedback. When I was touching an object or an animal with my fingers, I could feel the fingertips vibrating with a different intensity depending on the strength of the contact. LRA motors are good because they can provide more nuanced feedback than other types of motors.
I felt that the feedback was nice, and that made the experience more immersive and realistic, especially because they were hand-controlled experiences. As you can imagine, these gloves are mainly meant to be used together with experiences supporting hands tracking: with controllers you have no control over all the individual fingers, plus controllers already have their own haptic feedback and are not comfortable to be worn when you already have gloves. And if you use hand tracking, the biggest problem nowadays is that you don’t have haptic feedback, and this breaks a bit the immersion. Having TactGloves solved in part this issue, and improved my usual Quest hand tracking experience. I have also noticed that the fact I was wearing gloves didn’t impact the performances of the Quest hands tracking in a noticeable way. I was so satisfied with my quick test.
The only drawback I have found in my experience is that the feedback of just one motor for finger is not always enough. The gloves can only give you touch sensations at your fingertips and they also do not provide force-feedback, so they can only give you haptic sensations at the tip of your fingers. And while this is provided in a good way for the current standards of the technology, sometimes my brain really felt the lack of having more feedback at the middle of my fingers and on the palm. I suggested bHaptics CEO add a second motor for every finger, maybe in the lower part of every one of them, to make the haptic feedback richer, but he told me that doing so would have required raising the price a lot (almost doubling it), so they had to make a compromise.
And I think the choice they made is reasonable, because $299 is already not cheap for a VR accessory that is basically betting on the success of hands-tracking applications. A higher price would have hurt the interest from a good chunk of the possible customers. Honestly, I even hoped for something a bit cheaper, like $199. It is anyway interesting to notice that this is truly the only wireless glove (among the ones from the most famous brands) that is dedicated to the consumer market: the other ones, who are targeting enterprise customers, have a price which starts at least from $1000, so TactGlove is already one order of magnitude cheaper than the competition.
I’m happy to see bHaptics keep offering interesting products for an affordable price, and I can’t wait to discover what they will offer next. I also hope to be able to have a pair to review so that I can give you better feedback on these ones. I also invite you to contact bHaptics if you are developing an application built around hands tracking to evaluate a possible collaboration.
In the meanwhile, every comment and question in the section here below is very appreciated, as always!
(Header image by bHaptics)