We recently wrote about how VR technology needs to do better. Controllers can only emulate such physical sensations so well. No major VR company has released a glove that brings full, natural hand control to VR. Perhaps because the most advanced prototypes that exist today cost tens of thousands of dollars. Here are a few that are within my price range. A DIY project that looks super cool and costs about $12 per glove to make finger tracking actually work in VR.

For several months now, lucas_vrtech, a young hardware hacker, has been working on a series of haptic glove prototypes with the goal of making them "cheap and easy" DIY. The parts list includes very inexpensive components such as a simple Arduino board, a potentiometer, and a rotating spring taken from a small badge reel that you may have seen someone using in an office building. (WD-40 is also listed as an essential component.)

"Originally, this was a fun isolation project to keep me busy, but now that I have 200,000 followers, this project is so much more than that," Lucas wrote on the project's Hackaday page. My goal now is to spread the word about this project as much as possible and help more people fall in love with virtual reality."

Lucas posts updates on the project primarily on Tiktok, where it has attracted more than 300,000 followers since December. In just a few months, he has made remarkable progress, going from a giant hand assembly to an actual wearable glove. While still bulky, part of the appeal is seeing the gloves work with inexpensive off-the-shelf components like the badge reels connected to each finger.

The current third prototype works in several VR games, including Half-Life: Alyx, and has shockingly good finger tracking. Lucas has published diagrams, parts lists, and open-source drivers on Github so that others can build their own. [His fourth prototype is where the gloves really get interesting. In a typical game controller, haptic motors rumble in your hand to bring you closer to the sensation of shooting a gun or running across a rocky terrain; with the PlayStation 5's DualSense, Sony has taken haptic feedback a step further by adding resistance to the trigger The VR Glove's haptic motors have the even more difficult job of harnessing tension to make it feel like you are actually grasping an object when you move your fingers.

Lucas has posted several videos of the next iteration of this glove, showing a rather bulky motor attached around the wrist. The plan is to shrink this component in Prototype 5 once it is working properly.

Lucas has yet to publish a detailed tutorial for building your own haptic glove, which makes sense given the pace at which he develops new iterations. Every week he posts something new that makes the previous version seem outdated. It's exciting to watch and reminds me of the early days of VR, when world-changing technological breakthroughs seemed imminent; when VR hardware was finally available for everyone to purchase, the high price was one of the main reasons for its slow adoption. It's exciting to see VR enthusiasts like Lucas experimenting with ways to dramatically improve VR on a budget anyone can afford.