Udexreal UDCAP hands-on: very thin tracking gloves for VR

At the VR AR Expo China, I had the opportunity to try Udexreal’s incredibly thin tracking gloves. Keep reading for my whole first impressions!

Udexreal UDCAP VR Glove

Udexreal is a Chinese company that proposes a tracking glove called UDCAP. The peculiarity of this glove is that it is (according to the company) the most lightweight VR glove on the market. It weighs only 45g.

Udexreal can make a glove that is so thin and lightweight because it has implemented a sensor to track the fingers which has only 0.1mm of thickness. On the website, they mention the creation of a special “polymer material” that allows them to create “elastic sensors”. I guess we are talking about sensors that can detect how much they are bent, from which it can be extrapolated what is the bending angle of each finger. Regarding the number of sensors installed on the gloves, there is some confusion: during the event, I’ve been told there are 13 sensors for every finger, while on the website, they report having 12 sensors for the whole hand. I’ve written an email asking for clarification and will update the article as soon as I have an answer.

The gloves have both a consumer and an enterprise version. The consumer version is meant to be used especially in social VR applications like VRChat, to have all your fingers tracked reliably, so that you are social interactions are more natural. There is also an enterprise version that is dedicated to training and other B2B use cases. The company also advertises the use of the gloves for robotics applications. At the booth, they did not want to talk to me much about the B2B destination, though, because the focus was on the consumer side.

On the index finger, it is possible to install an add-on that transforms your glove into a fully fledged VR controller: the add-on has a little thumbstick and two tiny buttons (basically A/B buttons), so that you can have the full set of input of an Oculus Touch controller, but with all your fingers tracked.

The gloves are in a material that is defined as soft and breathable. The glove is also washable, which is good considering that if you wear it for long VR sessions, the inside of it is going to become dirty.

Udexreal UDCAP VRGlove price and release dates

The Udexreal UDCAP VRGlove is already available on the website of the company, which ships worldwide. The PR mentioned that the price should be $699, but there are some generous discounts available. For this reason, the shop page already reports $599, but she mentioned that if the glasses are bought through some partners (maybe influencers who are sharing discount codes), the final price can become as low as $530-$560.

Hands-on impressions

I’ve tried the Udexreal gloves with the popular SteamVR demo, The Lab. The first impression I had when I wore them was that they were really thin and lightweight, as advertised. The fabric is thin, and it doesn’t even seem that you are wearing tracking gloves; it seems you’re just wearing silk gloves. You don’t feel any electronics, any wires, nothing. It’s incredible how they just feel like thin gloves. This is the feature I loved the most about this product.

Comfort-wise, I don’t agree much with the statement of the breathability, though. The gloves were made in some synthetic elastic material, so I felt my skin was not breathing that much. My hands were feeling kinda warm and humid. Probably there is some work to do on this side.

As for the setup, it was kinda easy. Since the gloves are just thin standard gloves, I’ve just put them on my hands without any issue. Then someone from the team clipped the Valve Trackers on the mount on the back of the glove. At this point, a simple calibration phase started, where I had to make three gestures: fist, hand open, and hand open with fingers spread out. Everything was rather quick and easy.

After the tracking started, I could put the headset on and play The Lab. Inside the application, I could verify the quality of the finger tracking, and I saw that it was not bad at all. The gloves were able to detect pretty well the current bending of all my fingers. I said “pretty well” and not “perfectly” because the tracking had its share of issues. Starting with a finger fully spread out and gradually closing it, I had the impression that in the beginning, the detected angle was changing more slowly than the actual one, then it started to go faster than the real one to compensate for the initial error. So, more or less, the finger pose was correct, but it was not exactly accurate. As for the thumb, at the end of the The Lab demo, it started doing weird things, and the PR of Udexreal told me that it was because of some feature related to how objects are grasped in the demo.

Regarding the input add-on installed on the index finger, it was pretty ok. It is cool to have the thumbsticks to use teleportation and/or smooth locomotion, but at the same time, I found them to have a different size and sensitivity than the ones I’m used to on the Oculus Touch controllers. The two A/B input buttons are also very small. This means that you have to adapt to this new controller setup. Since I had just a few minutes to use them, I found them usable, but not very comfortable. The index and grip triggers are not present, so I think you emulate them by using your tracked fingers, something that I found a bit weird while playing the demo. Again, this is something that requires some adaptation. In general, I would need more time with these gloves to tell you how usable the input system is.

As for the haptic feedback, the mini-controllers were able to apply some haptic vibration to my index fingers, which was very nice to improve the sense of immersion. Yes, it is very basic haptics rumbling on just one finger, but for some contexts, it is enough.

Final considerations

I came out of the UDEXREAL booth thinking that their gloves are pretty interesting devices. The UDCAP VRGlove is incredibly light and thin, and it manages to deliver good tracking quality. It is not perfect, and its control scheme would require further analysis, but it could be a nice thing to buy for people who want to feel their true hands in XR.