Picking things up in virtual reality usually involves pushing a button on a touch controller, and it’s not exactly the most immersive part of a VR experience — it’s a constant reminder that you’re not actually interacting with anything. Oculus might be gearing up to change that with a set of VR gloves described in a pair of patent filings made public on Thursday, March 22.
It’s not the first time we have seen this kind of technology introduced to as a VR peripheral, and it’s also not the first time Oculus has dropped hints that it is working on this kind of technology. In February, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg teased the Oculus VR gloves in a Facebook post, and these patents shed some light on just what was going on inside those fancy white gloves.
“The haptic feedback mechanism includes a composite extendible ribbon coupled to a glove digit of a glove body. The glove digit is configured to be work around a [finger] of a user’s hand,” the patent reads.
The patents describe a pair of gloves that include internal “tendons” that tense and relax in order to simulate your sense of touch in VR. Normally when you touch something or pick something up, the pressure you experience in your fingertips is from your hand pressing against the object itself. These gloves work on the opposite principle — the tendons that run on the backside of the gloves are designed to offer resistance to your hand movements, simulating what it feels like to touch an object.
“The haptic feedback facilitates an illusion that a user is interacting with a real object when in fact the object is a virtual object,” the patent continues. “The mechanism resists movement by one or more portions of a user’s body.”
Think of it like tying a string to each one of your fingers and pulling up on those strings from behind your hand. It’s going to make clenching your fingers difficult, that kind of resistance is the exact kind of resistance these gloves use to simulate touch. On its own, it wouldn’t really feel like you were grasping an object, it would feel like something was pulling on your hand. But coupled with a VR headset, immersive sound, these kinds of physical cues can be the difference between a sort of immersive experience, and a truly immersive VR experience.
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.