In patents filings made public this week, Oculus describes a couple different technologies that could make its virtual reality even more realistic and immersive. The patents describe a couple methods for simulating touch in VR environments, one of which includes a “skin stretch instrument.”
It’s not as terrifying as it sounds. Pick up any object near you right now, notice how your hand cradles it, which parts of your hand are touching it. Those are the little details Oculus is looking to simulate. A smart phone feels different in your hand than an orange does, or a water bottle, or a coffee cup. These objects all feel different, in part because we hold them differently. Add on to that the fact that everyone holds objects in a slightly different way, and you can see how simulating your sense of touch can get pretty complex.
Oculus’ solution is a simple one: Build a haptic glove that can calibrate itself by simply monitoring how you interact with real objects. The first patent describes a technology that would live in the fingers, fingertips, and palm of a haptic glove. This is the “skin stretch instrument” really what it’s doing is measuring how your skin stretches, or compresses, when you pick up real-world objects. By measuring that, it’s able to calibrate itself to simulate those kinds of pressure.
Think of it this way: By picking up an object, the object is basically pressed against your skin in a couple different places on your hand. These haptic gloves would measure where the object presses against your skin, and how hard, and then using that information it would essentially learn how to use its internal “skin stretching” instruments to simulate physical touch.
To do that, the haptic gloves have a couple different methods at their disposal. First, it appears they will have a number of small “gears” or “rollers” in the fingers and palm of the glove, these will both record the calibration interactions described above, and provide mechanical feedback to simulate touch.
“The skin stretch sensor includes a mechanism that may comprise one or more gears and rollers that rotate when the user interacts with a real object,” the patent application reads. “The feedback surface is configured to simulate a force associated with the interaction with the surface.”
The second patent filing also concerns simulating touch once it’s recorded and calibrated by having the user interact with real-world objects. This patent filing uses expandable bladders hidden inside the haptic glove that can expand or contract, like miniature balloons, to apply pressure to your hands to simulate interaction with real objects.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.