Virtual Gloves Are Available for an Even More Immersive Gaming Experience

Virtual reality has been at the forefront of gaming headlines as of late, with advances and now-renowned names such as Oculus Rift, Vive and Hololens. But even though the virtual reality landscape is still relatively new and it still remains to be seen whether it will be as pervasive as the console, a company has already come in to develop some more cutting edge technology to make the entire experience more immersive. While many of us envision “virtual reality” as simply strapping something on your head, Manus Machina has created specialized virtual reality gloves so you can ditch your joysticks. Aimed to be worn in conjunction with a headset, the flexible, finger-sensing gloves will allow users to use their natural hand movements for another world of possibilities. “It’s basically a glove that accurately tracks what your hand is doing. It’s using flex sensors on each fingers, so it senses the bending of the fingers. And it uses an IMU module on the back of the hand which tracks the rotation, the yaw, the downward rotation of the hand. It has nine degrees of freedom,” says co-founder Stephen van den Brink. Showing off its working prototype at E3, the company is hoping to have a developers kit ready in the next few months with a cost of $280 USD. A consumer-market ready version is aimed to drop sometime next year, would you get this along with your Oculus Rift?