Manus, a company specialising in the development of VR Gloves, has made an announcement of its Quantum Metagloves at the GDC 2022 event. This new product helps to offer a high level of finger tracking efficiency in comparison to a lot of other solutions before. The company intend to provide the new technology to consumers although currently it is geared more towards business clients.
Manus already has a range of motion glasses got real-time virtual reality and motion capture use. Some of these are built on flex-sensor tracking and IMU.
The newest product being offered by the company, the Quantum Metagloves, move away from the technology used in prior devices by the company. It relies on a magnetic tracking mechanism to offer a higher level of precision in finger tracking and is quite useful for self-contact scenarios such as when a person’s finger touches another finger or the palm of the hand.
The new offering’s demo was showcased at the GDC 2022 event and it was the first look into it. This demo featured a hand model demonstrating the finger movements of a wearer in real-time. The glasses can function with 6DOF type tracking through the utilisation of a SteamVR tracker or other such motion tracking technology. However, the demo shown by the company did not feature a 6DOF use case. Whilst there was a latency in the demonstration the tracking features do not experience such latency.
The Quantum Metagloves work through a magnetic base that is positioned at the back of one’s palm whilst each finger has a tip module for responding to magnetic field sensations. According to Manus, these gloves are able to detect the absolute girth and length of a finger following calibration, raising the level of hand-tracking accuracy when used in conjunction with a skeletal model that can be custom scaled based on the user.
Based on the observations of the device at the event, it is capable of creating realistic tracking results of finger-palm and finger-finger contact. There wasn’t noticeable stuttering or clipping to take away from its performance. The sensors of the device are able to take in clean readings of positional data compared to several other products that rely on finger tracking.
Manus has expressed that the new product is one of its kind and ahead of many other options on the market that offer finger tracking features. They highlighted that it surpasses the issues of broken tracking when there is self-contact or close-contact like other devices. According to the company, some of the costlier alternatives that feature optical tracking can also suffer from events of self-occlusion or self-hand occlusion. Some IMU finger tracking devices also exhibit signs of drifting readings and demand a great deal of recalibration.
With that said, magnetic tracking does have its pitfalls. Some of these have to do with factors such as electromagnetic interference and, in some cases, latency.
Manus has acknowledged that the tracking can indeed suffer from exposure to factors such as electronic or metallic items being in the way. However, it emphasised that the gloves are able to provide consistent and precise tracking without being affected by interference.
