Sony has filed for three patents for a new glove controller. According to NeoGAF, who first caught wind of the company’s recent patent filings, the patents were submitted back in October of 2014, but they weren’t published by the US Patent & Trademark office until now.
The glove will likely need to be used in conjunction with a virtual reality headset and works by means of sensors internal to the glove that are responsive to the wearer’s movements, and external ones that will detect any objects that the glove comes into contact with. The glove permits interaction with other users wearing the same kind of glove – either in the virtual game space, or, for example in shaking hands with another player wearing a glove. As the patent states, multiple gamers can wear one or two gloves each and collaborate or interact with each other in another way, Game Spot explained in a recent report.
The patent goes on to suggest possible non-gaming uses for the glove, such as in a business presentation environment, saying that movements made by one user’s hand can appear to other users as if moving objects or pointing at things, for example on a page or whiteboard, according to NeoGAF.
In some embodiments, a glove may be used by one or more remote users to interact in a collaborative way to examine documents, screens, applications, diagrams, business information, or the like […] During collaboration, movements made by one user’s hand can appear to the other user as if a real user hand is moving things, objects, or making actions in the collaboration space […] if two remote users are examining documents, users wearing gloves can point at things on a virtual page, point and draw on a virtual whiteboard, lift and move virtual papers, shake hands, move items, etc.
According to WCCFtech‘s Alessio Palumbo, it’s likely that the glove will be used with Playstation VR. While this is by no means the first glove controller to appear, technological advancements coupled with improved VR environments could mean that Sony’s new version moves things on to a new level. However, as Game Spot pointed out, the existence of a patent is no guarantee that such a product will necessarily see the light of day in a commercial production run.
