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On Tuesday afternoon, Meta, a company formerly known as Facebook, made a supposedly exciting announcement: Gloves. But not just any gloves.It is a tactile glove lined with a miniature motor, which can use airflow to imitate the sense of touch, and Looks like a wearable nightmare.
There is nothing wrong with Meta inventing a 21st century thing Powerful Gloves Let you feel digital objects. The company has apparently been working on this project for seven years, and the team that built it is considering a future of at least ten years.Compared with the brainwave reading bracelet announced by Facebook earlier this year, this glove is also less disturbing (the company insists that the wristband Don’t read your heart). But it is becoming clear that even with a shiny new name, Meta is working hard to create Metaverse, a virtual space where people can work and hang out through avatars, which is more accessible to ordinary people-and not so much. It’s creepy.
Some people will like this strange jewelry. The prototype haptic gloves created by Meta Reality Labs are designed to work with future virtual reality systems. Most VR headsets currently use controllers equipped with joysticks and buttons in Congress. The Meta Quest and Quest 2, more Reality Labs products, and Provide hand tracking without controller, It uses the camera on the headset and computer vision algorithms to explain what your hand is doing and transform the action into a virtual world. So now, when you make the action of picking up an apple in VR, your actual hands will not feel the sensation of holding an apple.
Input: gloves. Meta’s prototype haptic gloves use the principle of soft robots and use pneumatic and electric actuators to quickly inflate tiny air pockets on the gloves’ fingers and palms. These actuators are essentially micro-motors that can produce a sense of pressure and thus a sense of touch. The idea here is that if Meta can install thousands of these actuators on haptic gloves and combine these sensations with the visual input of VR headsets or augmented reality glasses to project digital images into the real world, The wearer can then reach out to feel the virtual object. Wearing such gloves, one day you may shake hands with other people’s avatars and feel squeezed in Metaverse.
Meta did not invent tactile clothing.Several companies produce tactile vests, pants, and even The entire set resembles a battery-powered Marvel superhero costume. Since the early 1990s, various articles about tactile clothing have existed—much like the word metaverse, which author Neil Stephenson coined in a 1992 science fiction novel avalanche. Tactile gloves played a key role in Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel Ready player one, And the film adaptation of Steven Spielberg. In the real world around 2021, the vast majority of people who use this type of technology are really serious, wealthy players. For example, a tactile vest can poke 40 different places on your body, Spend $500.
It is worth pointing out that VR has historically been the realm of serious gamers, which is a potential problem for Meta and its grand plan for Metaverse.If Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone to use his metaverse product, like Nearly 3 billion people use Facebook, He relied on the science fiction-inspired inventions being produced by his Reality Labs and did not bring him any benefit.
Tactile clothing is a futuristic concept, but it is also very strange and can be intrusive. Do you want Meta (read: Facebook) to record data about your body movements through special gloves or scan your brain waves through a bracelet?Yes, Meta Quest hand tracking technology Does collect and store data about your actions. If you are playing a round of games, this may seem innocent Popular VR game Beat Saber In your living room. When you imagine a world where you do most of the calculations through VR headsets or AR goggles, you are more worried-this is basically what Zuckerberg thinks the future of the Internet will look like.
And there are many reasons to believe that the meta universe and Living through a pair of connected glasses can be coolAt the same time, it turns out that immersive VR technology is very useful for more and more non-gaming applications.On the same day Meta Reality Labs showed off its prototype haptic gloves, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Authorized VR system for the treatment of chronic painThis is not even the first VR treatment approved by the FDA this year.
You might say that Meta’s tactile gloves are another distraction-different from Facebook Renamed Meta in a bad scandal in history And make sure that everyone is talking about the meta universe in the coming weeks.
This is reminiscent of another Facebook announcement, which was made a few days before the name change. In mid-October, Reality Labs said it was launching a research project Analyze thousands of hours of footage Shoot from a first-person perspective to train artificial intelligence models.This dataset includes videos taken by Facebook’s smart glasses, which are Ray-Bans with cameraThe company calls the data set Ego4D and will release it to researchers around the world this month.
This project looks cool and is related to the Meta project to build a meta-universe, where someday people wearing smart glasses might want the computer to recognize what they are looking at? certainly. The company trains robots to see things. Does this seem worrying? Want to have a fairly large Metaverse, The next generation Internet-the same company many Say Yes destroy democracy? Exactly.
This story was originally published in the Recode Newsletter. Register here So you will not miss the next one!
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