De finibus praesentibus technologiae

So I went to last SIGGRAPH not too long ago, and I got an idea. The idea is separable into two parts: I have since found that the first part has been done, so I shall describe the second for now.

Most current research in haptics is focused on the simulation of textures, rather than force-feedback, simply because there's more interesting work (and more work that's interesting) to be done in the former than the latter. At present we simply can't easily apply virtualspace forces to the entire human hand without huge, unwieldy exostructures; the only low-profile force-exerting gloves in development that I'm aware of use magnetorheological fluid, and those can fundamentally only exert a resistive, reactive force rather than an arbitrarily-directed active force. This is fine if you just want to trick the hand into feeling the surface resistance of an inanimate virtual object, but isn't so useful for, say, shaking hands with someone half a world away.

So you can't easily move someone's hands by computer control with any reasonable degree of precision, (even if they're cooperating). This is a shame, because otherwise you could wear a long jacket or a cape or somesuch, harness a MacBook Air to your back, tuck a couple of minicameras through your collar (possibly concealed amongst many distracting rhinestones), and replace Tom Hannu's fingers with a pair of force-gloves.