Senso is an experimental glove peripheral that tracks individual fingers for virtual reality hand controls, while offering haptic feedback that includes vibration and temperature fluctuation. If you want the technical details, you should check out Road to VR’s solid and appropriately skeptical rundown, because we’re not really here to talk about Senso. We’re here to talk about our eternal, unrequited, and misplaced love for the VR glove.
At first glance, gloves seem like a simple, obvious Controller Of The Future: they’re a semi-ordinary piece of clothing that can simultaneously track natural finger motion (unlike a handheld controller) and provide tactile feedback (unlike Kinect-style cameras.) That’s why there are a billion different versions of them. You’ve got the famous Nintendo Power Glove and its high-end inspiration, VR pioneer Tom Zimmerman’s VPL DataGlove. Road to VR names a half-dozen recent examples besides Senso, and that’s still not a comprehensive list. And then there are all the fictional iterations — perhaps most famously, Tom Cruise’s stylish three-finger gloves in Minority Report.
Yet despite all this effort, motion-tracking gloves aren’t part of any modern consumer virtual or augmented reality system. Because like an ostentatious mustache, cybergloves only work if you get them exactly right — and until that point, they’re just silly-looking and unpleasant. Why? Let me explain.
‘Fits like a glove’ is just an idiom
Gloves are only one-size-fits-all if they’re small but super-stretchy, and VR gear often needs to pack in a lot of electronics. This means that development kits — which is what most cybergloves are — tend to run large. If you’re not a big person, their much-vaunted freedom of movement gets hampered by the wads of fabric around your fingers, while air gaps dull haptic feedback.