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The touchy-feely world of the metaverse and future gadgets
Soon, game players will able to pick things up – and feel the bullets, when they are hit
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HaptX’s gloves have their air pumped in through a network of tubes which inflate 135 tiny balloons incorporated into each glove.
PHOTO: HAPTX_INC/INSTAGRAM
The Economist
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The brave new world Aldous Huxley describes in his novel of that title features the “feelies”. In 1932, its year of publication, movies were turning into talkies. Feelies must have seemed a logical, if creepy, extension of that. The book alludes to a film at a local theatre with a love scene on a bearskin rug, in which the sensation of every hair of the bear is reproduced.
The feelies have still not arrived. But people are working on them. In computer games and virtual reality (VR), two heirs to cinema’s role in light entertainment, practitioners of the discipline of haptics are attempting to add a sense of touch to those of vision and hearing, to increase the illusion of immersion in a virtual world. In future, they hope, if you reach out to pluck an apple from a tree in such a paradise, your hand will no longer go through it. You will, rather, be able to feel and grasp the fruit, if not actually eat it. Conversely, if it is a paradise lost you are in, and a baddy hiding behind the apple tree shoots you, you will feel the bullet’s impact.
