Facebook Wants You to Suit Up for the Metaverse
The company’s VR gloves are impressive (and creepy), but will the average consumer want to wear them?
Headset, check. Robotic gloves, check. Full body Metaverse suit… not yet, but don’t rule it out.
When Facebook pulled its PR stunt (sorry, restructuring) and rebranded itself as Meta, it announced that it would spend over $10 billion to make the Metaverse a reality. Well, a virtual reality. Sigh. You get the point. Now, the company has released a prototype demo to show off some of this work — a VR glove — and the first tangible indication of how the technology will allow users to interact with a digital environment. The product has been in development for over 7 years, and the team tasked with creating it admits it’s thinking a decade into the future, another way of saying that the tech is very early stages. It should be noted that a VR glove startup called HaptX has already released a statement, calling the prototype “substantively identical” to their own patented technology. It seems Meta is still playing by the same rulebook of ‘if you can’t buy it, copy it.’
Nonetheless, the technology is impressive. Though it’s far from its fully realized form, the tangle of wires, sensors and materials can do some truly amazing things. By incorporating 15…
