Udexreal is a Chinese company that proposes a tracking glove called UDCAP. The peculiarity of this glove is that it is (according to the company) the most lightweight VR glove on the market. It weighs only 45g.
Udexreal can make a glove that is so thin and lightweight because it has implemented a sensor to track the fingers which has only 0.1mm of thickness. On the website, they mention the creation of a special “polymer material” that allows them to create “elastic sensors”. I guess we are talking about sensors that can detect how much they are bent, from which it can be extrapolated what is the bending angle of each finger. Regarding the number of sensors installed on the gloves, there is some confusion: during the event, I’ve been told there are 13 sensors for every finger, while on the website, they report having 12 sensors for the whole hand. I’ve written an email asking for clarification and will update the article as soon as I have an answer.
The gloves have both a consumer and an enterprise version. The consumer version is meant to be used especially in social VR applications like VRChat, to have all your fingers tracked reliably, so that you are social interactions are more natural. There is also an enterprise version that is dedicated to training and other B2B use cases. The company also advertises the use of the gloves for robotics applications. At the booth, they did not want to talk to me much about the B2B destination, though, because the focus was on the consumer side.
On the index finger, it is possible to install an add-on that transforms your glove into a fully fledged VR controller: the add-on has a little thumbstick and two tiny buttons (basically A/B buttons), so that you can have the full set of input of an Oculus Touch controller, but with all your fingers tracked.
The Udexreal UDCAP VRGlove is already available on the website of the company, which ships worldwide. The PR mentioned that the price should be $699, but there are some generous discounts available. For this reason, the shop page already reports $599, but she mentioned that if the gloves are bought through some partners (maybe influencers who are sharing discount codes), the final price can become as low as $530-$560.
Good to see you go. Now time for you to leave the country Nazi.