You can build these cool VR gloves for little money and even use them in Half-Life: Alyx. We will show you what the parts can do.
What kind of gloves are these? An inventor has been working on VR gloves for a few months. Originally, this was supposed to be just a project for quarantine, he says. But now, over 310,000 people follow the crafter and his project on TikTok.
With the gloves, he aims to make the VR experience even more realistic and provides updates on his progress in weekly videos. Now motors also play a role, making grabbing with the hand more realistic.
This is how the VR gloves work
Why is this cool? With the “normal” VR controllers, you have control through your hands, but it feels unnatural. And controlling each individual finger is often unnecessarily complicated.
As reported by PCGamer, reasonable prototypes of VR gloves likely cost thousands of euros (via PCGamer/roadtovr). The do-it-yourself project by hardware hacker lucas_vrtech looks exciting and costs only about $12 per glove. Approximately 19 € for the pair (then you have to add costs for Bluetooth and Force Feedback). And the parts even have “real” finger tracking. You can control individual fingers in games like Half-Life: Alyx with it.
This is what it looks like: Over 310,000 people have followed lucas_vrtech’s account on TikTok since last December. His videos have been viewed over 4 million times.
On the Hackaday website (via Hackaday.io), the developer writes: “Originally this was just a fun quarantine project to keep me occupied, but 200,000 followers later, this project is now much more than that. My goal now is to spread this project as far as possible and hopefully help more people fall in love with virtual reality.”
From video to video, you can see progress with the gloves. In his prototype #4, the project is already quite impressive. He installed haptic motors, like those from the new PS5 controllers “DualSense”. The motors in the gloves are supposed to create the feeling of actually holding something in your hand when you grab something in the game by the tension of strings.
Currently, the gloves are compatible with games like Half-Life: Alyx, Aperture Hand Lab, or the shooter Pavlov.
This is what happens next: Lucas plans to release a video on YouTube on April 7 at 11:00 PM (via YouTube).
Do you want to build this too?
This is known: The inventor has not yet published a detailed step-by-step guide. However, you can find drawings, parts lists, and an open-source driver for the gloves on the GitHub website (via GitHub).
Is this something you want to try out or do you not have VR at home yet? Share your thoughts on virtual reality here in the comments on MeinMMO.
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