On Tuesday afternoon, Meta, a company formerly known as Facebook, announced that it was exciting: gloves. But not just gloves. It is a haptic glove with small motors that use air blasts for touch, and it seems like a nightmare.
There is nothing wrong with Meta making the 21st-century Power Glove which allows you to hear digital objects. The company seems to have been working on the project for seven years, and the construction team is considering at least ten years from now. Gloves are also less stressful than the brainwashing bracelet that Facebook announced earlier this year (the company insists on wristband) they do not read your mind). But it is clear that, despite its new glittering name, Meta is struggling to create a metaverse, a place where people can work and chat through avatars, accessible – and harmless – to the average person.
Some people may like this silly hand gown. Built by Meta Reality Labs, the haptic glove design is designed to work with specific future systems. Many VR headsets currently work in congress and console with buttons and buttons. Meta Quest and Quest 2, many Reality Labs items, too provide manual tracking without a guide, which uses a head-mounted camera and computer algorithms to interpret what your hands are doing and translate the movement into a real world. That’s why right now, when you start packing an apple in VR, your real hand won’t feel like you are carrying an apple.
Enter: gloves. Meta’s prototype haptic gloves use principles based on soft robots and use pneumatic and electroactive actuators to insert tiny air sacs into the fingers and hands of gloves. These actuators are actually small motors that can cause a person to be stressed, hence, touch. The idea is that if the Meta can match thousands of these actuators on a haptic glove and combine the sensations with a VR head or visual mirror, which displays digital images in the real world, the wearer can reach and hear. real things. With gloves like these, one day you can shake hands with someone else’s avatar in the metaverse and feel the pressure.
Meta did not make haptic clothing. There are several companies that make haptic vests, pants, and even all suits that match the Marvel high-end battery-powered clothing. Various versions of haptic costumes have been around since the early 1990s – such as the term metaverse, created by author Neal Stephenson in a 1992 sci-fi book. Snow damage. Haptic gloves played a major role in Ernest Cline’s 2011 book Ready Player One, and in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation. In the real world of 2021, most people who use technology like this are players who have money. A haptic dress that shakes you in 40 different places on your body, for example, cost $ 500.
It is worth noting that VR in history has become a major player player, and that is the potential problem for Meta and its large metaverse system. If Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone to use their flexible resources, e.g. about 3 billion people use Facebook, does not do itself any good by relying on sci-fi-led products that its Reality Labs are releasing.
Haptic clothing is an idea for the future, but it is extremely confusing and can be confusing. Would you like Meta (read: Facebook) to cut down trees related to your body movement through special gloves or watch your brain waves through a bracelet? Yes, handwriting expertise for Meta Quest collects and stores information for your transactions. This can seem innocent if you play around the popular VR Beat Saber game in your living room. It also applies when you consider the world in which you use most of your computers via VR head or AR glasses – which is what Zuckerberg thinks the future of the internet will be.
And there are many reasons to believe that metaverse is living through internet-connected glasses can be cool. At the moment, in-depth VR technologies seem to be useful for many non-gaming applications. The same day that Meta Reality Labs unveiled its haptic glasses, Food and Drug Administration approved the VR system for the treatment of chronic pain. And this isn’t the first VR support approved by the FDA this year.
You could say that Meta gloves are another distraction – not unlike Facebook changing its name to Meta among the worst reputations and making sure everyone talks about the problem for the coming weeks.
It’s also a reminder of another Facebook ad, which came just days before the name changed. In mid-October, Reality Labs said it was launching a research project that could do so scan images for thousands of hours shooting from a first-person perspective to teach intelligent design models. Included in the data set was a video captured by Facebook’s smart glasses, which is with a Ray-Bans camera. The company is importing the Ego4D set and will present it to researchers around the world this month.
Does the project look good and in line with Meta plans to build an environment where one day smart people would want the computer to detect what they are looking at? Zedi. Does it seem like a worry that the company teaches robots how to look – the company wants to have a larger share of the metaverse, the next generation of internet – is the same company information to say and to destroy democracy? It does.
The article was first published in the newspaper Recode. Sign in here so don’t miss the next one!