It is just like the Energy Glove, however for VR

Nintendo’s Energy Glove was, to cite one of many eighties’ most interesting movies, “so bad.” The NES peripheral transfixed a era of children, solely to later understand that the “dangerous” on this occasion ought to maybe have been taken a bit extra actually. Nintendo finally offered 1 million of the issues, however the expertise simply wasn’t there, and the dream controlling gameplay with a robo-glove appeared to have died together with it.

With the newfound (relative) prominence of digital actuality, maybe it’s time give the concept one other go. Definitely interacting on this manner makes a heck of much more sense in VR than it does an 8-bit facet scroller. That is the promise behind ContactGlove, a brand new product from the Japanese agency Diver-X, which debuted this week at CES.

Picture Credit: Brian Heater

Along with selecting up an Innovation Award on the present, ContactGlove can be the topic of an ongoing Kickstarter campaign, which has already handed its $200,000 objective, with 16 days left to go. The product combines hand monitoring with haptic suggestions to present the consumer a extra hands-on strategy to interacting with the digital setting round them.

After calibrating the system, ContactGlove tracks finger actions for extra pure interplay, in addition to button/stick actions made with the hand for a extra conventional gaming expertise. Battery life is round two hours with haptics on and eight hours with it turned off. It’s also possible to scorching swap the battery to stick with it and operating.

The product claims to be a less expensive/extra accessible strategy to VR gloves than what’s at the moment on the market. In fact, when coping with VR {hardware}, “cheaper” is actually relative. The agency places the ultimate retail value of the product at slightly below $500 for the pair.

It’s appropriate with HTC Vive headsets, in addition to Steam VR {hardware}. The corporate can be making an SDK accessible for Unity and Unreal Engine builders to make higher use of the system. Diver-X expects to start out delivery in July, at which level we’ll discover out what sort of dangerous ContactGlove actually is.