A Real Life Haptic Glove (Ready Player One Technology Today) - Smarter Every Day 190

Hey, it's me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I love Ready Player One. It's a fascinating book about this virtual world called The Oasis, based here in Columbus, Ohio. If we're ever gonna get to a virtual world, we have to have ways to interact with that virtual world with our bodies. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

So this is the first episode of a series on technology like this, here on Smarter Every Day. We're gonna go test-drive a virtual haptic glove. It's not virtual, it's an actual haptic glove, but it's a way for you to use your physical body to interact with a virtual world. So let's go to California, to a company called Haptx because there's an engineer, I have questions about how such a glove would work.

There can only be a certain amount of resolution that should... Yeah, questions. Let's go to California.

• You're Kenan, right?

• I'm Kenan.

• So what's going on here? What do we have?

• So we have our glove prototype, which is called Glens, and we have a HTC Vive and a computer to drive the experience.

• You're tracking where the glove is in 360 degrees. Okay.

• I think you should just try it.

• Just try it?

• Yeah.

• Okay.

• It'll make so much more sense to you if you...

• Alright. Let's do it.

• Put your hand in it like this, keeping your fingers tight. And then once you kind of pass like this area, you'll spread your fingers out and... into the finger sockets.

• Okay.

• Alright, you're not officially doing VR until you have a bucket on the head, so now that we got that on me, we are ready to go. Let's enter the simulation.

• [Faint] So you hear things through the headphones.

• Yes, I hear...

• Music?

• I hear music that makes me want to take a nap.

• Do you hear the rain and...

• And I hear lightning.

• Yeah. This is good, stick your hand out and...

[Voiceover] This is the exact moment I realized that they've done something amazing. I'm not a VR believer, but you can actually feel each individual raindrop in your hand. It's not wet or anything like that, but it's perfectly timed, perfectly positioned, and your brain accepts it.

• Feel free to explore the environment.

• I can pick which finger I want to feel it on. Hold on. I'm trying to feel individual raindrops now. Hold on.

• You definitely can.

• Can you really? Okay, so it's directional, so you're having to do... You're doing a coordinate transformation for the hand.

• Oh, look at you, you put a logo on the back of a hand! You guys are clever. [chuckles]

• Oh, I moved it! :D Okay, I feel like a kid, this is pretty cool. Alright, so I can move...

• You can just explore and anything, feel free to touch anything that you can see where it is.

• I can just touch all this stuff.

• Yep.

• So I can move this lighthouse. Oh, I'm not... Oh! I'm not far enough in the 3D world. That's crazy. Oh, it's getting harder to...

• That's the force-feedback you're talking about. It's pulling on the back of my finger.

• Yep.

• So you have to model the curvature of a finger. Can I actually... What's that noise I hear? Do I hear static?

[Voiceover] Up to this point in the simulation, I'm just feeling things with my hand. But this glove has something called force feedback. If you look on the back of the fingers, there's this tape that can hold your fingers in one position. And when I finally picked up a rock, this is the moment where everything clicked.

• So, can I come over here to pick up a rock? [laugh]

• Alright. Alright, I'm cool. Alright. I heard a tractor. Hey! Alright, you don't have gravity in your simulation?

• Oh, that was... OK, that was rad dude. This is... Alright, who made this simulation?

• Kenan and Johnathan. Both of whom are standing over here.

• Kenan and Jonathan made this?

• Yeah.

• Okay, this is really cool. What did you make the simulation in?

• Unreal Engine. Four.

• Whoa, whoa, leave my sunflowers alone.

• You might need to re...

• No, we're good.

• ...re-grow them.

• Regrow the sunflowers? I need a cloud or something. Can I shake some water out of it... Yeah, I can! [laugh]

• Ken and Jonathan make the simulation?

• It's Kenan.

• Kenan! I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time hearing you I got the headphones in. So, good job Kenan for this.

• Oh, what's up? Hello, guy.

• So if you reach your hand out palm face up close to the fox he'll actually jump in.

• Can I stand up?

• Yeah. Okay, so I've got a cable here I've got to be careful about, right?

• Yeah, you're good.

• Okay, so I'm gonna submit. In Zelda, I'm used to killing every fox I see, so I'm gonna be really nice to this fox.

• You can try to kill it, it's pretty hard though.

• Oh, you can feel it walking around! You're a genius. Did I point to you, Kenan?

• Roughly.

• Kenan, you're a genius. I really want to use my other hand. You guys need... That is cool as mess man. What's up? I don't, like... what do you... I mean like if a puppy is sleeping on you you're not allowed to move.

• How do you feel about spiders?

• Spiders? I'm cool with virtual spiders. Spiders are not my favorite.

• But you are cool with virtual spiders.

• Yeah, have you had people freak out doing this?

• Yep.

• Have you really?

• One time we didn't ask... big burly military guys like a rocket bombing.

• The haptic feedback is incredible, so...

• The spider man blurred the line between hurtful and real.

• That's... okay, so what's so cool about this is... How many different sensors do you have in the palm? Because I'm feeling every leg.

• A hundred and twenty in the total glove.

• A hundred and twenty?

• Some of those are in the fingers.

• Okay, so how on earth... How on earth are you controlling 120 different bladders inside my palm? Without just crazy...

• So, these are not bangbang actuators, these are... These are... what was the term? It's like they're infinitely variable actuators.

• They're pretty continuous, yeah.

• Continuous, thank you.

• The nice about air, we can control the pressure of them.

It's way cooler than I thought it would be, I'm gonna be honest. I thought it would be cool, but it doesn't take long for your brain to just totally engage with it, does it? I'm gonna sit this spider. Oops, my bad, spider. Gonna sit you right here.

• So now that you have become appointed with our virtual farm, are you ready to defend it?

• Defend the virtual farm? Heck yeah, let's do this.

• Alright. Smack, squeeze...( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

• Oh, you actually have to get there. This is like way cooler than I thought it would be. There's no way this is gonna translate to video. And I'm totally against VR. Just to be clear, I don't think it's gonna catch on, but this has changed my mind.

• That's awesome.

• Seriously.

• So go ahead and reach out for that confetti. It should feel a little lighter than anything else you've touched so far.

• Yes, you're right. It is a continuous actuator. You've gotta tell me how you did these bladders. I have to know that.

[Voiceover] Okay. That's pretty much it. That's the experience with the glove, but I'll say this: in the next video, we're going to talk to every single engineer that was in the shop that day. We're gonna figure all this stuff out, so it's obvious there's motion tracking. It's obvious there's little bumps happening on your fingers. It's also obvious that something's making your fingers resist motion.

So in the next video, we're gonna cover all this stuff. I'm gonna be straight up with you. I thought VR was stupid, and this changes it for me because it's another layer on top of the other stuff going on in your brain. So I always thought moving around in a virtual world didn't make a lot of sense. But I think this is gonna matter, so I don't know exactly what it's gonna look like in the end, but this is a really good base concept.

And I'm excited to see what they do to get this to market, because all the variables are being taken into account at this point in time, and I don't think they were in the past, so I'm excited about this.

Anyway, if you enjoyed this episode I would appreciate it if you would support Smarter Every Day by supporting the sponsor, which is Audible. You can do that by going to audible.com/smarter and getting a 30-day free trial of Audible. It's fantastic. I recommend Ready Player One, which is obviously why I started thinking about haptics in general.

So if you want to support Smarter Every Day you can also, to the number 500-500, text the word smarter and you'll get that 30-day free trial of Audible. That's gonna help Smarter Every Day if you do that, and that's going to help me continue to fly places like this to make really cool videos like this.

Okay, this is the haptic glove. I have another piece of man-machine interface technology that's in the Oasis and Ready Player One type stuff in an upcoming video. So feel free to subscribe to Smarter Every Day if you want to see that. I think you'll enjoy that as well.

Anyway, I'm Destin, you're getting smarter every day. Have a good one. Bye.

So real quick I've been talking with Leigh, and you're in charge of this whole facility, right?

• I'm one of the people who helps make things happen, yeah.

• Okay, so he was telling me that people can actually come work here. Because you need engineers?

• We do.

• So you're gonna give me a link and I'll leave it below.

• Uh-huh.

• And people can come work on this project if they want to.

• Yeah haptx.com/careers

• Okay, we're here in California. It's a rad place. This is real-deal engineering. So anyway, I'll leave a link for you. Awesome.

• Pull that knob out.

• Pull it out?

• Yeah. Uh, yeah. And then...

• Oh god, I thought I broke it for a second, I thought that I'd broke it! [laughs]