What can make virtual reality more involving? Especially if you think about apps for gaming, user’s experience is the key: to be successfull a videogame must be not just exciting, but able to capture the player’s imagination so to trigger the “suspension of disbelief” mechanism.

Virtual reality increasingly haptic

If a player cannot imagine himself/herself inside the game, he/she will walk away very soon. Sofar player’s traditional experience is based on the senses of sight and sound, but in the future virtual reality games will be able to engage the player through the sense of touch to increase immersive game experience.

How? Through controls able to let the player feel touches, vibrations, and full-body physical assaults. The ability to let players feel the recoil of a weapon, or the blow of a sword and so on, is called haptic feedback.

Haptic engines for new sensations

To succeed in reproducing this developers working on controls and devices for virtual reality video games will use “haptic engines” specially-designed embedded in gloves, vests, and other wearables able to convert gaming actions into phisical sensations.

By using a combination of engines of varying sizes and powers, haptic feedback devices can provide sensations ranging from a tickle to a sharp blow.

There are already startups like Go Touch VR (which we already described), NullSpace or Teslasuit which are developing such devices, others, still in an alpha phase, were seeing in the latest months in many startup contests in Italy (Shocking T, from an idea of Gianpaolo Greco and Stefano Nicosia, aka MinDBlinD Setsuko in Second Life, is a good example).

What do you think about?

Virtual reality will be increasingly an haptic experience? Several experts are ready to swear, but whaat do you think? Please leave a comment and if you like share this article, you will help us to cover always better the items you prefer!

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