(Also who else is pissed off at VR companies for having obvious things they’re overlooking in terms of haptics? I might be a bit behind on all this but hear me out at the end.)

Tactical Haptics is in the process of/has successfully (to an extent) created a controller with inertial response, so you have recoil when you fire a weapon, weight when you swing a sword, recoil when you hit something with a sword or punch someone. It’s a bit big and clunky from the looks of it at the moment, but reviews of their earlier work was all positive; I can only imagine it going up from there. No individual finger tracking though.

Control VR went under, from the looks of it they were trying gloves and arms with stuff that detects your movements based on joints. Kinda a mechanical approach from 4 years ago, before modern “lighthouse” tech. 

Steam and HTC are working on controllers that track your hands via sensors, no force feedback from the looks, but a trigger is still in-built on the controller, so your index finger still operates like any other controller does, and you can only go into a gun grip and not a fist. No force feedback for guns from the look of it though. A lot of this is to fix HTC’s earlier clunky grip buttons, as they’re trying to go for full-hand tracking (except for thumb; that’s for buttons and joysticks). There’s also pressure sensing so it can tell if you’re gripping really hard. Not sure how comfortable it is to hold, though.

Oculus is working on headsets with in-built computers, so that the rig doesn’t have to be wired into a computer, and they’re finally focused on acquiring the same level of standing interaction as Vive. Little late to the party though, but good stuff for the company that kinda started it all with the headsets. Considering everything, they’ve really stuck in from going from a kickstarter.

A company called Axon is working on a full-body haptical suit that can (finally) track your legs in VR, via a harness hanging you in midair, stuff to restrict you when your legs run into something, and I heard they’re working on temperature stuff as well. The suit is supposed to have multiple haptic layers, to be able to simulate intense levels of depth. Their price is looking like $200,000 at the moment though, so uh, good luck. (Also it’ll break your fucking arms and legs.)

Leap Motion has had this really reliable hand-tracker controller, but their current focus is on Augmented Reality stuff. They were doing some incredibly promising VR stuff with “Mobile VR” headsets which seems to combine their hand tracking with the headset. This is really good for when you’re looking at your hands, though as of March 2016 it does seem to have a little bit of the Kinect jitters from incomplete tracking, due to your hand moving out of sight of the sensor. Again, seems like they’re a little focused on cool simulations to interact with their hand sensors in AR as of 3 months ago.

HaptX is working on gloves that are able to restrict your movement, generate temperature, and work on individual “haptic pixel” levels that sound like they’re pretty convincing to me. They’re not gonna be able to do gun recoil or force feedback like any of that, but it sounds pretty cool in terms of the pick-up-and-hold factor. So you might be throwing warm fireballs and cold snowballs instead of feeling the recoil of a gun or a sword, which is cool in itself. (Also it’ll break instead of your fingers.)

There’s this full-body suit called the Teslasuit that’s trying to straight-up be Ready Player One but I don’t trust it and I don’t know enough about it to say anything ‘cause nobody’s even worn a prototype of the suit.

Microsoft has developed a “Claw” called the CLAW that has your index finger be able to dynamically touch and interact with virtual objects, as well as provide some feedback when you fire a gun. It seems to be able to render the texture of objects, too, though again, the depths of this haven’t been fully explored by the consumer market. It’s got like, one sensor for the thumb that changes the mode from “I wanna poke stuff” to “I wanna grab stuff.” Pretty rudimentary but the texture tech has potential, since it uses . (Also it’ll break your fucking fingers.)

Now here’s what I mentioned before. So many of these designs are complementary, like the SteamVR Knuckles controller and the Tactical Haptics controller, and/or Oculus's new stuff with PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING ELSE. I’d draw an idea myself but it’s like 2 in the morning. Lemme convey what I want from VR Haptics: I want full body tracking through, like, retro-reflectors on knee and elbow pads maybe, I want us to somehow figure out the two-handed rifle problem from more than just a software standpoint (I’m looking at you, BrandonJLA), and I want a VR fighting game I can kick, punch, knee and elbow, not even necessarily with recoil (Okay maybe just punch recoil). I don’t want to trip over wires, and finally, I just don’t wanna be shot where my chest, legs, and arms aren’t. You can greatly reduce the amount of inverse kinematic work just by giving us knees, elbows, and shoes to work with.

The big question we might be asking in a bit is “Controllers or gloves” and I don’t have the answer to that; The biggest major difference appears to be in force feedback with recoil favoring the controllers, and textile feedback and precision motor control favoring the gloves.