Omni Glove Lets You Hold Virtual Objects and Feel Them in Your Hand

With virtual reality rushing towards us at faster and faster speeds, I’ve oftentimes made the claim that while it’s very impressive on paper, in practice VR headsets are very little more than gaming on fullscreen. Now, we could change that if we had more immersive motion controls, but what are we supposed to do, hook our VR devices to our Wii U’s and swing WiiMotes around?

Thankfully, the folks at Rice University have a better idea. Check it out.



That’s right: by way of motion sensors and inflatable ‘bladders’ hooked up to your fingers and hands, the Omni-Glove will simulate the feel of holding objects in virtual reality, taking things one step further than your standard motion control peripheral.

A good idea? Yes. A nearly essential one for making truly immersive games rather than just slapping a screen six inches from your face? Absolutely. Unfortunately, the technology has not been streamlined and there’s no indication that the team at Rice has any ambition for commercializing the glove, but maybe it’ll catch the eye of other tech firms who might be willing to take on that task.

In fact, I can think of one industry in particular that would be interested in this kind of tech…

Look, I could pretend this isn’t the advent of 100% real virtual porn, but we’re all adults here (I assume) and I trust you’re all smart enough to realize that porn is the first and best application for something like this. You can pretend “oh, it would be so much more immersive in Skyrim to hold the bloodied, decapitated skulls of my enemies in my hand”, but let’s face it: there’s nothing we’d rather touch than a nice pair of boobs (or a penis/butt whatever it is Girls like to touch… hair, maybe?), and that’s exactly what we’re going to do with this once it’s out to the public.

And it will be fantastic.

I was going to have the above banner image be boobs to really accentuate that point, but I've never crossed that line yet and for the sake of my good conscious I'd like to hope I never will.