Development of Gloves That Provide Realistic Tactile Sensation in Virtual Reality

Professor Junbum Bae's Team at UNIST

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] A virtual reality glove technology that allows users to feel tactile sensations with their hands as if in real life has been developed.

Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) announced on the 27th that Professor Bae Jun-beom from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, together with Professor Koo Dong-hwan's team at Seoul National University, developed a glove system that delivers heat and vibration sensations to users when touching objects in virtual reality, making it feel like touching real objects. The glove’s high-precision flexible sensors measure the user's hand movements and transmit them to the virtual reality environment, while stimuli such as heat and vibration from the virtual world are fed back to the hand.

The glove developed by the research team can measure the angles of 10 joints across all five fingers in real time and can also vary heat and vibration levels in multiple stages. This allows the finger movements to be instantly displayed on the virtual screen, and in virtual reality scenarios such as holding a hot metal ball in hot water, users can feel sequential temperature changes as if they were putting their hand into and out of hot water. It is also possible to feel temperature differences when touching metal chunks and wooden blocks with the hand. Since the developed glove system integrates stimulus delivery and sensor functions, it can be widely applied in virtual technology training, games, and entertainment fields suitable for the non-face-to-face metaverse era.

Key components of this glove, such as sensors, heating elements, and conductive wires, are thinly and precisely manufactured using a self-developed liquid metal printing technique, maintaining performance even when the fingers bend or move. The research team previously developed a high-precision flexible sensor fabrication technology using the liquid metal printing method.

Professor Bae said, “This is the first research to simultaneously implement the functions of sensors, heaters, and conductive wires through liquid metal printing,” and added, “It will greatly contribute to the development of various wearable systems using the liquid metal printing technique.”

Virtual reality worlds operated by remote controls lack immersion because in reality, people touch or manipulate objects with their hands. This is why companies entering the metaverse industry, like Facebook, are competing to develop technologies that measure hand or wrist movements.

The research team’s developed glove system goes one step further by stimulating tactile sensations. Since vision accounts for over 70% of human sensory perception, existing virtual reality systems have mainly focused on delivering visual information, but to create a more realistic virtual reality world, other senses must be stimulated.

Professor Bae expressed his expectations, saying, “The developed virtual reality glove will be an innovative interface in the VR·AR field, which is mentioned as a core technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” He founded Feel the Same in 2017 using soft sensor technology based on liquid metal and is leading the commercialization of laboratory-developed technologies.

Meanwhile, virtual reality technology, along with augmented reality (AR), is increasingly used in fields such as training, gaming, and entertainment. The market size is also expected to reach approximately 62.1 billion dollars worldwide by 2027.