Overview

My college buddy Tim Foldy-Porto and I worked on a haptic glove in 2020-2021.

Initially, the goal was to build the glove as part of an exoskeleton to control a robot. When we hand the glove to our beta testers, they are most exicted to use the glove for VR interactions. For example, a musician developed an app with our glove that lets the glove generate open sound control (OSC) commands, which can be used to create or control music in Ableton Live, Logic, etc.

The glove measures 13 joints on the hand (none on the pinky unfortunately) and 3 angular coordinates for the palm. In addition, it provides users with tactile feedback (vibration + skin stretch).

Here is a video demo of the force feedback mechanism that we developed. You can see a tactile module on the thumb in the video. We've also made tactile modules for the other fingers, but those modules are detachable so they're not shown here.

We designed and manufactured the PCB to control the sensors and motors of the glove.

Here's the glove parts before assembly.