(c) Rachel Freire, Becca Rose, & the Intangible Realities Lab, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0

Following on from some preliminary work we published in early 2019, I had an amazing last few days in the Intangible Realities Laboratory, spending time with the fabulous E-textile artists Rachel Freire and Becca Rose making v3 of our open-source VR data gloves, which we have specifically designed to facilitate multi-person interaction of the sort required to carry out careful molecular manipulations during interactive simulations.

It’s part of a larger research study investigating strategies to move beyond controller-based interaction in VR – ultimately we want to simply reach out, touch, and move simulated molecular objects using our hands and fingers. The *.gif shows the final phases of our development workshop, with six glove-wearing VR users from the IRL. Stay tuned – we’ll be testing and publishing more over the next several weeks!