This Weird Haptic VR Glove Evokes One of Nintendo's Most Iconic Flops

VR is an exciting area for many reasons, but I personally love it because it’s still a new enough niche to get really strange. That means all sorts of passion projects from lesser-known developers, 3D-printed accessories, and whatever the hell this is actually wind up seeing the light of day. Relatedly, it also means Sharp might, for real, produce this ridiculous haptic VR glove that evokes Nintendo’s most iconic and infamous flops.

YO. Sharp has made a haptic vr controller! Also the first image is someone giving a headpat, so I have high hopes, lol.
Some of you might remember Sharp is working on an HMD that they debuted back in Parareal London.
I REALLY think this design is better than gloves. pic.twitter.com/0yGNNUqCcf

— Lhun (@DyLhun) July 21, 2025

I present to you: a haptic VR glove made by Japan-based company Sharp. While this is still a prototype, Sharp says its glove is capable of using haptics to translate textures and shapes in VR. Sharp says it aims to have haptic sensations on each of your five fingers, but that level of tactility could change depending on whether developers/users want more of it down the line. One thing that stands out about Sharp’s glove is that it also has a traditional controller attached, so if you’re not in a haptic VR mood, you can just use the on-glove joystick and buttons to navigate or play. It’s a haptic glove with a little dose of Quest 3 controller. Nice.

Sharp says its gloves won’t “allow for delicate finger tracking,” which I assume means it won’t have tracking on top of the haptics but would probably still be able to be registered by native hand tracking on a VR headset. It also doesn’t provide resistance like other haptic gloves (i.e., registering when you’re gripping something that’s either hard or soft). Even with those caveats, I can see a glove like this bringing a whole new level to VR experiences. I’m not a big fan of VRChat myself, but something with a similar feature set to this glove would probably appeal to anyone who’s into that sort of thing, though the provisional $700 price tag may be a dealbreaker. Regardless, if you have the expendable income, coupling this glove with Bigscreen’s VRChat-edition Beyond 2e headset would be a winning combo, you have to admit.

If you’re a connoisseur of old Nintendo hardware, the other thing that may jump out to you is the fact that Sharp’s glove is giving big Nintendo Power Glove energy. If you don’t know what that is, here’s a picture of the Power Glove, released in 1989—notably well before VR took off in any mainstream kind of way.

Nintendo’s glove was clearly well before its time, and while it didn’t have haptics in it, it combined motion controls and analog buttons in a way that was revolutionary for the time. Granted, it didn’t work all that well, but you have to give Nintendo credit for trying to push the boundaries. I’m going to give Sharp the benefit of the doubt and say its glove—should it ever be released on a wider scale—will probably work better than the Power Glove, which would be great for both Sharp and anyone who buys it. Either way, it’s another fun exercise in the wild ways we can further augment a VR experience for a niche that’s done quite a bit of growing since the days of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy.