As someone who has tried a lot of virtual reality demos, trust me when I say that the ability to see your hands—and to use them to reach out and interact with the virtual world—makes all the difference. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Sony Computer Entertainment has filed a patent application for a "glove interface object" that could help provide accurate virtual reality hand tracking without the need to actually hold a controller.

PlayStation VR already has a hand-tracking solution, of course, in the form of the PlayStation Move controllers that were first released for the PlayStation 3 in 2010 . But this glove offers a bit more functionality than those handheld wands, including sensors that can "identify a flex of at least one finger portion," contact sensors that can detect when you touch a thumb to another fingertip, and sensors that measure the user's "finger position pose" (which can then be rendered on the screen).

The end goal is to "simply provide a way of touching, holding, playing, interfacing or contacting virtual objects shown on a display screen or objects associated with documents, text, images, and the like," according to the patent application.

That document mentions (and shows) an illuminated "trackable object" attached to the glove for positional tracking—bringing to mind the glowing balls that are already used to track those Move controllers—and inertial sensors to detect the tilt of the wrists. Meanwhile, a pressure sensor could "quantif[y] an amount of force applied to at least a portion of the glove interface object," to "define a level of an action... for the virtual environment." Integrated "haptic feedback" would also give the user some tactile sense of what a held object feels like.

The patent application, published by the US Patent and Trademark Office just yesterday, was originally filed on October 17, 2014. That's only a few months after Sony unveiled the VR headset then known as Project Morpheus to the public, so the timing suggests this patent wasn't just a random flight of fancy. This may be a potential interface solution developed alongside Sony's nascent virtual reality plans. If you need more proof that this glove idea was being designed with VR in mind, the patent makes multiple mentions of "head-mounted displays" that "can provide a visually immersive experience to the user."

It should go without saying that a patent application isn't the same thing as an actual product in development, and there's no indication whether or not Sony is actually working to bring these kinds of VR gloves to market. That said, we really hope Sony manages to finally fulfill the promise embodied in the clunky but beloved Nintendo Power Glove. That would be so bad.