Gloves

Last month, social media giant Facebook rebranded as Meta and revealed its vision for the future of online interaction. Much of the news so far has focused on what users will see, but the company is also working on bringing touch to the Metaverse.

Donning VR headsets for training can bring some realism to a simulated training environment, but it would be better if you could feel objects you interact with in the virtual realm. That's precisely what the SenseGlove Nova gloves are designed to do.

Over the years, we've seen a number of experimental "smart" gloves that convert their deaf wearer's hand gestures into text. The aptly named Sign Language Translation Glove, however, is claimed to be the first mass-produced product to do so.

Any fitness expert will tell you, weightlifting is about more than just lifting weights up and down. A new set of "smart" gloves is designed with that in mind, as they track multiple performance metrics in real real time.

In the world of fast-paced online gaming, every second of response time counts … in fact, make that every millisecond. The Impulse Neuro-Controller was designed with that in mind, as it detects mouse-clicks before they actually happen.

Although there are now many heated gloves on the market, the Antelife G1 is claimed to be the world's first to feature precisely adjustable heat. I recently had the chance to try a pair out, and they performed just as advertised.

Video game-controlling gloves may be nothing new, but the things do still tend to be relatively heavy and rigid. That could soon change, however, when and if the lightweight, flexible InfinityGlove reaches the market.

We've covered a number of motion-tracking gloves designed to translate sign language into audible speech, and a team of bioengineers at UCLA has just come out with another design that's more compact and lightweight than any we've seen previously.

If someone is lacking a hand, a prosthetic appendage can help them perform basic daily tasks. However, what if they've still got both hands, but one of them is paralyzed? Well, that's where NeoMano is designed to come in.

Although heated gloves have been around for some time, the things are generally pretty thick and bulky – best-suited to activities like skiing. Candle Apparel has designed a more dextrous alternative, in the form of its "city-oriented" Candle gloves.

Although drones or other robotic devices could certainly help astronauts to explore other planets, controlling the things while wearing spacesuit gloves would be a challenge. It was with this in mind that the Astronaut Smart Glove was created.

Getting real, physical movements accurately depicted in the digital world remains a challenge for programmers and engineers, but a newly developed glove promises to advance the tech significantly. It's able to capture hand movements with much more detail and nuance than most existing solutions.