Haptic glove company HaptX is partnering with Advanced Input Systems as well as announcing a $12 million funding round.
The new financing round will fund the production of next generation HaptX gloves designed for VR and robotics, according to the startup. The investment round includes existing investors like NetEase and Amit Kapur of Dawn Patrol Ventures. New investors include Mason Avenue Investments, Taylor Frigon Capital Partners, Upheaval Investments, Votiv Capital, Keiretsu Forum and Keiretsu Capital. HaptX was founded in 2012 and has raised $19 million so far.
HaptX has offices in San Luis Obispo and Seattle and plans to show off its latest tech at CES in Las Vegas from Jan. 7-10.
Current VR headsets use tracked hand controllers with rudimentary haptic effects to provide touch feedback. Our sense of touch represents an incredibly hard technical problem to simulate in a fully believable fashion. Creating physical resistance across all 10 digits, for example, is a kind of holy grail in VR research. Facebook’s chief VR researcher Michael Abrash believes that by the year 2028 we may have such a device.
“I predict the first time you get to use your hands with haptics in VR it will be as much as a revelation as the first time that you put on a VR headset,” Abrash said at 2018’s Oculus Connect VR developers conference.
HaptX is also partnering with Advanced Input Systems, a Human-Machine Interface company, to collaborate on product development and manufacturing.
We’ll bring you the latest information about HaptX after we check out their latest demos at CES early next month.
