Haptic gloves
Haptic gloves are gloves that give the hand a sense of touch or force while the wearer handles objects in a virtual environment, and most of them also track the position of the fingers (Caeiro-Rodríguez et al., 2021). ISO 9241-910 defines haptics as sensory or motor activity based in the skin, muscles, joints and tendons.
Fyware's XR glossary, with the source behind each definition.
Haptic gloves are gloves that give the hand a sense of touch or force while the wearer handles objects in a virtual environment, and most of them also track the position of the fingers (Caeiro-Rodríguez et al., 2021). ISO 9241-910 defines haptics as sensory or motor activity based in the skin, muscles, joints and tendons.
With a VR headset on, a hand that grabs a virtual part closes on empty air. ISO 9241-910, the international framework for tactile and haptic interaction, gives a vocabulary for what is missing. It splits haptics into touch, which relies on receptors in the skin, and kinesthesis, which relies on muscles, joints and tendons and, in the standard's own notes, includes both input and output.
On the skin side, the standard uses vibrotactile for stimulation of the skin by vibration, with a cell phone alert as its example. A vibrotactile glove puts small actuators at the fingertips that signal contact while the finger keeps closing. In the 2021 systematic review of 24 commercial gloves by Caeiro-Rodríguez and colleagues, nine offered this kind of feedback, all of them through vibration. Most used linear resonant actuators (LRAs), similar to the vibration motors in game controllers and smartphones. The TactGlove DK3 from bHaptics works this way, and the company lists eight haptic points per hand, five of them at the fingertips and the rest on the palm and wrist.
Force takes mechanics, and only three of the 24 gloves in that review offered it. The standard defines force feedback as force applied to the user and detected by the user, and the review describes two ways to produce it. Passive gloves resist the fingers with brakes, clutches, springs or magnetorheological fluids and only act when the user tries to move; active gloves push the fingers with motors, and most cap that force at about 10 newtons, roughly 2.2 pounds of force, to avoid injuring the user if the system fails. Most force-feedback gloves in the literature are passive. SenseGlove's Nova 2 is one of them. Its documentation says it brakes the cables that run along the back of the hand with up to 20 N, about 4.5 pounds of force, on the thumb, index, middle and ring fingers, so the user can always open the hand but cannot close it past a set point, and the glove cannot move the fingers on its own. The pinky gets no force feedback. For touch, the Nova 2 adds four vibration actuators, two in the palm strap and two at the tips of the thumb and index finger.
To fire a vibration or a brake at the right moment, the system has to know where each finger is, and the review spells out the dependency: force feedback requires hand tracking, while tracking works without force feedback. The Nova 2 measures the fingers with its own sensors, from how far its cables extend. SenseGlove requires a recalibration at the start of every session because the readings change after a restart and differ from one user to the next, and the glove needs a tracker or the headset's controller mounted on it to place the hand in space. The TactGlove has no tracking sensors and leaves that job to the headset's cameras; bHaptics says that, tested with a Meta Quest 3, it keeps about 90% of bare-hand tracking accuracy. Cameras carry the limit the review points out, occlusion, since they lose any finger that moves out of their line of sight.
In a training program, the glove pays off when touch or force is part of the procedure being assessed, such as feeling a connector seat fully during assembly or easing the grip on a part that breaks if squeezed too hard. When the training is about a decision, the headset's hand tracking usually does the job: in Fyware Safe's PPE simulator, the worker picks protective gear and puts it on with their own hands, with no controllers, and a single headset handles 15 to 20 people per hour. Shared gloves bring sizing and hygiene into the plan. The TactGlove comes in four sizes, S through XL, with an antimicrobial, machine-washable inner glove, and for high-traffic shared environments bHaptics recommends disposable inner gloves; the parts with motors and wiring are wiped with a soft cloth because they must never be washed. For battery life, bHaptics lists four hours of playtime per charge for the DK3, and SenseGlove says a Nova 2 charge lasts about half a day of back-to-back demos at trade shows. The review found battery life between 2 and 10 hours, depending on how hard the glove is used.
In the case photos of Access Virtual's portable flight simulator, the person in the cockpit wears bHaptics gloves and rests both hands on the controls. Fyware built the simulator's extended reality layer as part of Access Virtual's development team. It integrated an XTAL 3 headset and its own hand tracking, which runs in parallel with the headset so the pilot sees and uses their own hands inside the cockpit; the gloves were added so that pressing a button returns something to the fingers. Each peripheral talks to the simulator through an engine Fyware wrote, and those engines keep every device in agreement about the same cockpit. The case explains why the cockpit is flown with no controllers in hand: aiming a wand at a switch teaches a motion the pilot will never use in the aircraft. The motion platform and the patent belong to Access Virtual, which describes its simulator as having six degrees of freedom and being engineered to the FAA Level D standard; Fyware did not measure those claims, and the case publishes no training-outcome figures.
«sensory and/or motor activity based in the skin, muscles, joints and tendons»
The standard defines haptics as sensory or motor activity based in the skin, muscles, joints and tendons, made up of touch and kinesthesis. It defines vibrotactile as stimulation of the skin by vibration and force feedback as force presented to the user and detected by the user.
«Notice that kinesthetic feedback requires hand tracking, but not vice versa.»
A systematic review, following PRISMA, of 24 commercial gloves active from 2015 to 2021. It calls haptic gloves the ones that provide kinesthetic or tactile feedback, separates passive force feedback (brakes) from active force feedback (motors) and found vibration to be the only tactile technology in commercial use.
«Without internal tracking sensors, TactGlove complements your headset's native hand-tracking»
The TactGlove DK3 product page lists eight haptic points per hand (five fingertips, two on the palm, one at the wrist), four hours of playtime per charge, sizes S to XL and a washable inner glove. Tracking is left to the headset's cameras, and bHaptics reports about 90% of bare-hand tracking accuracy on Meta Quest 3.
«The Nova 2.0 can provide up to 20N of force along each finger»
SenseGlove's documentation says the Nova 2 brakes the cables along the back of the hand with up to 20 N on the thumb, index, middle and ring fingers, cannot move the fingers by itself, needs a mounted tracker or controller to place the hand in space and must be recalibrated at the start of each session.
Most are both. The haptic side is output: vibration on the skin or resistance against the fingers. Finger tracking is input, and many gloves measure it with their own sensors; ISO 9241-910 even notes that kinesthesis includes both input and output. A few, like bHaptics' TactGlove, carry no tracking sensors and leave the input to the headset's cameras.
At least two current models list it. According to bHaptics, the TactGlove relies on camera-based hand tracking and works with Meta Quest 3, Quest 2, Quest Pro and the Pico 4 series. SenseGlove lists Nova 2 and Nova 1 as compatible with Quest 3 and Quest Pro, with the Quest controller mounted on the glove to place the hand in space, and rates Quest 2 support as limited because that headset's Bluetooth chip cannot run two gloves in standalone mode. Neither company lists the Quest 3S on the pages checked, so confirm it with the vendor before buying.
A data glove measures the hand and sends finger and hand pose to the computer. The review by Caeiro-Rodríguez and colleagues counts the VPL Data Glove of 1987 as the first one and notes that “data glove” is still by far the most common name for the whole category. A haptic glove also sends something back to the hand, vibration or resistance, and since most haptic gloves track the fingers too, in practice they are data gloves with feedback added.
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