Meta’s VR/AR Glove Project May Be Its Biggest Moonshot of All

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, gets a lot of flak for working on ideas that others have pioneered first, not least of all the metaverse. Is its AR/VR Reality Labs division actually working on anything ambitious and fairly unique? In the case of its haptic glove research, which Meta detailed in a new post Tuesday, the answer might actually be “yes.”

Companies like HaptX and SenseGlove are building heftier haptic VR gloves for business use today, but Meta is aiming to build a soft, flexible consumer glove that nevertheless provides realistic feedback. The more you learn about these gloves, the more it looks like this is where Reality Labs might actually be breaking the most new ground. Not that this is coming anytime soon: a semi-decent consumer glove is likely many years from commercial release.