SPOTLIGHT VR and AR
The haptic gloves are off !
Meta’s new haptic technology prototype glove and its markets are being analysed by IDTechEx
L
ate last year, the Reality Labs (RL) team at Meta (formerly known as Facebook) released a selection of media showing
a prototype haptic glove product, including videos of Mark Zuckerberg trialling various demos. The prototype haptic glove uses pneumatically- controlled microfluidic systems to deliver local haptic feedback to different areas of the hand, along with what appears to be additional kinaesthetic feedback on each finger, anchored against the wrist.
Meta and HaptX Here at IDTechEx we have been keenly following this market, which is growing steadily, passing $4bn in 2021, and which we forecast will reach $5bn by 2025.
However, every now and again,
there’s a product that gives a sense of the déjà vu. To those that have been following the haptics industry, Meta’s prototype has several similarities to a product developed by HaptX. In fact, having not seen many other examples of this technology shown commercially, our initial instinct was to check whether the two companies have joined forces over this technology.
Not so! HaptX’s founder and CEO, Jake Rubin, released a statement that many core aspects of Meta’s prototype “appear to be substantively identical” to HaptX’s existing patented product. The subsequent media coverage of this story has been nearly ubiquitous in suggesting that Meta is in the wrong.
10 April 2022 | Automation
One less-discussed aspect, however, is that Meta holds a significant number of patents related to haptics in VR, including a group of patents filed by Facebook from 2015-2017 and granted in 2019, focusing on microfluidic channels, hard/soft touch simulation, use of pneumatic bladders to form touch arrays and their integration into gloves, and specific reference of use for interaction with virtual objects. Examples include:
• Switchable fluidic device – dated
March 2019; • Haptic devices that simulate rigidity of virtual objects – dated June 2019; • Pneumatically-controlled haptic mechanisms with nested internal structures for haptic feedback – dated August 2019.
Growing interest
The point is that, despite the legal wranglings between the two companies, there’s investment and development going into advanced haptics from a key player.
At the time of HaptX showing its VR
wares, our fellow IDTechEx analyst, James Hayward, described its haptic glove products as “the closest thing we have today to the kind of science-fiction haptics that many will imagine for a truly-immersive metaverse”. The fact that development teams at Meta or any other large technology company are building and testing prototypes using this technology (as well as other promising options using electro-mechanical polymers, smart
IDTechEx analyst is testing HaptX’s haptic technology gloves
textiles, and more) should not come as a surprise to anyone following this field. Indeed, Meta is not the only large technology company with interest in this area.
Great news Regardless of any potential issues with HaptX, Meta’s haptic glove prototype announcement is great news for this space as a whole. For such a large and influential company to have invested so heavily in this technology and is developing high-end haptics platforms shows the broad opportunities that are available in this space. This will spread awareness and accelerate the progress toward wider adoption of advanced haptics, whether with microfluidics or otherwise. There are many other start-ups developing new products within important technology niches, which together form the future of the haptics technology landscape. They are met by similar internal efforts and early patent development by equally-interested technology giants, and testing the boundaries of each of these patents is a normal part of the process as the industry continues to develop.
CONTACT:
IDTechEx
www.idtechex.com
automationmagazine.co.uk
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