Can You Touch Things In Virtual Reality? - Government Technology

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- Analytics
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- Lohrmann on Cybersecurity
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- Election Technology
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- Budget & Finance
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Magazine
About
- About Us
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- Center for Digital Education
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For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers. Question of the Day Can you touch things in virtual reality?

Answer: Yes, with a special glove.

November 13, 2020

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While virtual reality may feel real in many ways, there are still a few of our senses that it just can’t reach, preventing that full immersion experience. One of them is a sense of touch — you can pick up an object in VR, but you can’t feel it in your actual hand. That is, unless you’re wearing a special glove that can make you feel something. Created by scientists at Cornell University, this prototype glove acts as a stretchable skin sensor that monitors the movements of the fingers and creates the feeling of touching something. Each finger is covered with a stretchable lightguide made of a transparent polyurethane core and an LED-linked core full of absorbent dyes. Those dyes light up and register your actions when you move your fingers, which could in turn tell the glove to provide feedback to those areas where your fingers think they’re coming into contact with something.