Today, workplace professionals are leveraging haptic glove devices to suit necessary use cases such as training, virtual prototyping, marketing, and entertainment.
What haptic gloves provide is an evolution from a traditional XR controller input with a joystick. The technology elevates the overall user experience and adds value via realistic simulated feelings of pressure, weight, texture, and heat.
The haptic glove market is booming; recent insights from Expert Market Research note that the haptic glove market is set to expand at a CAGR of roughly 53 per cent, forecasted between 2024-2032. So, haptic gloves may reach more enterprise users than ever in the next five years.
Firms leading the market, like WEART and its TouchDIVER haptic glove, enable enterprise customers to create more compelling, impactful, and engaging immersive experiences to benefit users and businesses.
This exciting field, alongside other emerging XR techs like digital twins, can lead to new opportunities for innovation and growth.
What are Haptic Gloves?
Haptic gloves are a relatively new solution that is still emerging compared to the advancements of VR headsets.
There are other forms of haptic feedback devices outside of haptic gloves. However, the technology’s ability to simulate sophisticated real-life interactions presents a strong value proposition for suitable use cases.
Haptic gloves make XR applications more realistic for the user via a series of different methods, depending on the glove’s design firm; a glove provides pinpoint feedback directly to a user’s skin, allowing XR developers to represent a virtual object with the utmost precision.
Moreover, deep digital operating systems and frameworks mean that haptic gloves can differentiate between different surface properties such as metal, plastic, wood, and other materials to provide user feedback typically felt on the fingertip.
Notably, WEART’s TouchDIVER is a lightweight device that helps improve realism compared to the broader haptic glove market by combining different output feedback modes to render force or texture, and the product also uniquely renders object temperature.
“Multimodal feedback is essential; it provides realism in the experience and creates engagement with the user,” said Guido Gioioso, the CEO and co-founder of WEART.
VR is often commonplace in high-risk training scenarios because it can’t be recreated easily. “For safety and firefight training, realistic tactile feedback, including temperature, enhances the effectiveness of the experience”, stated the CEO.
In the medical field, healthcare professionals can gain crucial insight via haptics that provide feedback distinguishing different organic tissues during an operation.
On the other hand, during high-risk safety training, haptics can prove essential in industrial scenarios, such as in oil and gas companies, where haptic gloves can enhance machine training.
Introducing Haptic Gloves to Enterprise
Gioioso noted that WEART is currently working with companies to introduce haptic glove technology to new markets, aiming to make the user experience as “realistic as possible, especially for assembly or maintenance tasks.”
Haptic gloves replace traditional joystick and controllers, allowing users to experience a more realistic interaction.
Moreover, by introducing a more detailed input method via a haptic glove, businesses can overcome XR device adoption hurdles, namely workers unfamiliar with gaming controllers – which also vary from device to device.
Interoperability, as always, is critical. Haptic gloves, of course, are no different. When introducing emerging technology, vendors meet customers on their adoption journey; some may already have the necessary hardware and software, and some may not, so successful integration relies on a proper understanding of a workplace use case and the individuals.
WEART works across multiple headsets, such as devices from Meta, Pico, and HTC Vive – which range from virtual reality to mixed-reality headsets -an interoperable approach that means a customer is not limited in their choice of hardware.
An interoperable haptic solution enhances an existing XR program; if a workplace has an XR training course operating, they can smoothly integrate a haptic glove device – “users can incorporate TouchDIVER without changing anything in their current setup; all they need to do is integrate the SDK and get rid of the controllers.”
Gioioso added:
There is value in haptics because it allows the user to receive information through the skin, which is typically not an XR communication channel. Usually, people rely on their visual or auditory channels, but in an XR experience, having something that gives you information through the skin is valuable because frees up the visual channel.
Haptic Gloves to Move the Needle
Demonstrations of haptic glove development from firms such as Meta showed off bulky devices, which interested some but ultimately didn’t push the needle.
However, haptic gloves are seemingly returning, with smaller form factors bringing more reliable usability promises to the technology.
Haptic gloves are here to stay, with digital twins skyrocketing in business value recently – with digital twin immersive solutions projected to experience a CAGR of 36 per cent up to 2030, as stated in Deloitte’s Tech Trends report – sophisticated ways of interacting with those digital objects are crucial.
Whether a virtual product demo or high-risk simulated training procedures, haptics gloves allow businesses to gain increased value in XR setups.
