In a few hours, AWE US is going to start and it promises to be a great event. I know one of the companies which is going to exhibit there: it is called Weart, they are Italians like me, and they propose a very interesting haptic device. Let me tell you something about it.
Weart gloves
I tried Weart device at Laval Virtual, but before it, I was able to have also a private demo in my office in Turin. There I had the occasion to test the device without the usual rush of an event, having some quality time with Guido Gioioso, cofounder of the company, and Fabio Pizzato, which is supporting it.
Weart proposes a haptic glove, called Touchdiver, which is not a full glove, but it is composed of three small cylinders (I’ll call them “caps”) where you put your fingers in. The caps are for the thumb, index, and middle fingers and they provide the haptic sensation for your VR experience. When I asked Guido why just three caps and not five for all the fingers, he talked about the usual compromises that are necessary to keep the prices low, adding that anyway studies show that those three fingers are the ones that give the most strength to the hand grasp, so are also the ones where haptic feedback is more relevant. The finger caps have a rubber adapter of three different sizes (S, M, L) which help in making the finger stay inside the cap.
Inside the finger cap, there is a little metal plate that touches the skin of your finger. It can provide three kinds of feedback to the user:
- Haptic force: the plate moves toward your finger and presses the skin to make you feel the sensation of something squeezing your fingertip
- Vibration: the plate vibrates so that you can feel the texture of virtual objects
- Temperature: the plate can become hot and cold to make you feel the temperature of objects.
This is the specialty of Weart gloves: they can make you feel three haptic sensations in just one device. And while the vibrations are quite standard in VR gloves, the change of temperature is not common at all. Usually, devices providing temperature emulation are just focused on it, while this glove offers the full suite of haptic sensations with the only one lacking being force-feedback on the fingers.
The fingertips are connected with some cables to a little box that lies on the back of the wrist of the user, which most probably contains all the circuitry to command the behavior of the finger caps. The box is tied to the wrist thanks to a velcro band that you wear like a bracelet.
The glove per se doesn’t have positional tracking, that’s why the little white box is magnetic and you can attach on it a Vive or Oculus controller. There is a little mount that you secure to the controller and it attaches magnetically to the box, so that you can have positional tracking and use your hands in the VR experiences as if they were controllers.
The company also offers a Unity SDK for the gloves, with ready-out-of-the-box prefabs that make you easily create your haptic experiences.
At the moment, everything works only for PCVR.
Hands-on Weart Touchdiver
I tried two demos with Weart gloves, one in my office, and one in Laval. Both of them were meant to make me feel all the sensations provided by the glove (force, vibration, and temperature).
Wearing the glove was quite a simple process, and it just required wearing the wrist box and then the finger caps. It is pretty cool that once you have worn the bracelet on your wrist, you can actually put the three fingers into the device stored in the box to wear immediately the finger caps and the white box. Let me show it with a short GIF, because this is so oddly satisfying:
At this point, you have to secure the magnetic mount to the controller
and then attach the mount magnetically to the white box
As you can see, the process is quite straightforward.
The overall comfort was quite good, but I had the problem that the finger adapters didn’t fit perfectly the size of my fingers: M was too small, and L was too large. I went for an M to make the glove more stable, but this meant the device squeezed a bit my fingers and when I removed it, I could see some clear signs on them.
On the short run, the device is quite comfortable, but in the long run, it suffers from the same fate as some similar devices: it results in a bit of strain because the hands become “heavier”, plus the bracelet on the wrist becomes a bit a nuisance because it doesn’t make your wrist always move freely. These things were not a big deal, but anyway were there.
As for the haptic sensations of the Touchdiver, I think they are quite interesting. Having the possibility of having such diverse sensations just in one single glove is very cool. I was particularly excited by the temperature emulation because it let me feel hot and cold sensations, which is pretty uncommon. And the hot was really hot and the cold really cold, with the transition between the two happening pretty fast: in the demo, I could go from a fire to a piece of ice and feel the difference after very little time. With the fire, I had the sensation my skin could burn… but actually, Guido told me it was very safe, it was just a sensation. I won’t comment on the vibration/texture emulation, since it was similar to the one offered by many other devices, but I’ll comment on the force feedback. Having a piece of metal squeezing the fingertip is a good strategy to have “hard” pressure haptic feedback, and this is good. But sometimes, during the demo, the metal plate moved too fast, and it almost scared me because I felt something move abruptly against my finger. I wasn’t expecting that, and when I started the demo, the first times it happened, it was a bit weird to me. Anyway, at the end of the day, the overall haptic feedback of the Touchdiver is anyway good.
I had also a brief opportunity to try the Unity SDK, and I confirm that is quite easy to use because the company already provides many prefabs that make the life of us developers easy. You have just to put in the scene the special prefabs for the user hands provided by Weart, and then define the haptic properties of every object in the scene by adding a script that defines its property of force, texture, and temperature. That’s it. The SDK is also integrated with Unity.XR, so it is already ready to be cross-platform.
Price and availability
You can already buy the Touchdiver by contacting Weart. You can also ask me for an introduction if this can help you. The price is 5000€ per glove, so the pair is gloves is in total worth €10,000. This price is in line with some other haptic gloves on the market.
Final commentary
I like Weart. Yeah, one reason is that they are Italian like me, and another one is that they are really nice people, so I like to chat with them wherever I can. But apart from the personal side, I like that they are trying to offer something different in the haptic world, and their patented solution to offer three different haptic sensations on the fingertips is pretty cool. And as I’ve already said, I’m totally in love with the temperature haptic feedback… feeling hot and cold sensations is so cool.
Of course, the Touchdiver, like all the other haptic solutions on the market, is not perfect. It just serves 3 fingers out of 5, it is not super comfortable to wear in the long run, the “pressure” feedback on the fingertip sometimes is too abrupt. All these things could be improved, and the company is already working on them. But overall, for the current status of the technology, I think this is a solid product. All the companies that are looking for a complete haptic solution, versatile enough to be able to replicate different kinds of sensations, should have a look at it. The only thing I think this device truly misses is some kind of force feedback because, for the rest, it offers a very complete haptic experience. The price is not cheap, but again, this is the current status of the market, where the cheapest glove (Senseglove Nova) is anyway worth $5000.
I also think that Touchdiver is one of the best XR devices to try in an XR expo now, so if you are at AWE, don’t forget to stop at the Weart booth and try their gloves!