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These VR Gloves Will Let You Feel the Pain of Fire and Ice

Powerclaw will be able to (safely) electrocute people in VR.

For every announcement of a new VR game—which there are so, so many—there are at least as many pitches for more VR hardware. We've seen weird treadmills, $25,000 robots, and even a damn monocle. And now fresh from the floor at GamesCom in Germany comes the Powerclaw, a $600 haptic response glove that prickles your hands with cold, heat, or electrical shock.

A Mexico City startup, Vivoxie, is looking for crowdfunding and showing off the Powerclaw to attendees at GamesCom. The glove uses temperature regulators to pipe safe levels of heat and cold to the fingertips. Internal vibration motors also simulate impact, touch, and even the roughness of a surface as a hand drags across it. Importantly, the gloves do not provide any motion tracking, so they might not work very well with motion-connected controllers like those for the Vive.

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It may sound potentially silly, but haptic response like this could open up all kinds of new ways to play games. Something as tactile as Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes could use puzzles deciphered by surface texture. In space sims like Elite: Dangerous, having a way to give players a simulated electrical shock could make damaged electronics much more real.

That's all theoretical, but by all reports, the Powerclaw is pretty effective at making VR feel more immersive. That said, the Powerclaw's role inside a broader trend toward separate, frequently contradictory, hyper-specialized peripheral hardware is no less exasperating.

The VR revolution has finally arrived, and frankly it looks like fucking garbage. Here's where we are right now: spend thousands on a high-end PC and a thousand more on a head-mounted display; if you want to walk around, find a wide open area in your house or, worse, a giant 360° treadmill; if you're going to be in a cockpit, sit in a dynamic feedback chair; equip yourself with a haptic response vest; set up motion tracking for your hands with something like Leap Motion; and finally pull on the temperature response gloves and maybe, just maybe, you'll feel like you're really there for an hour or so.

This is all bullshit, but it's also how it starts. Looking at pictures of early computers reveals their clunky origins. They take up too much room, they're expensive and fragile, and they barely justify their own weak computing power. But every year computers got a little bit better, and a little bit smaller, until suddenly the future happened.

Eventually, we'll look back at people covered in hardware, draped in more wiring than a human battery in the Matrix, and it will look completely insane. Plugging in one more thing to trick your brain for VR is stupid and expensive and inconvenient, but we have to start somewhere. Powerclaw looks like yet another dumb idea right now, but it could look prophetic in decades to come.