FeltSight

FeltSight invites people to explore their surroundings through their fingertips. Inspired by the star-nosed mole, a pair of soft haptic gloves works with Apple Vision Pro to make nearby surfaces perceptible before physical contact. Vision recedes into darkness; small clouds of light appear around the hands, while vibrations bring distant textures into the body.

Exploring the forest with FeltSight’s haptic gloves and mixed reality headset.

Concept: feeling a world into view

Vision often acts as the default pathway to knowledge, shaping both everyday habits and the interfaces through which people encounter the world. FeltSight questions this sensory hierarchy by making touch the starting point for exploration. The wearer must reach, probe, and move to discover what is nearby. A tree trunk, a leaf, or another surface becomes an invitation to slow down and attend to texture.

The work draws on more-than-human design and Donna Haraway’s tentacular thinking. Its splayed gloves turn the hand into an exploratory organ, while the diminished visual field makes perception depend on an ongoing relationship between body and environment. This is an artistic encounter with another sensory organization, rather than a literal reconstruction of a mole’s experience.

The concept of an umwelt describes a perceptual world shaped by a creature’s particular senses and ways of acting. FeltSight uses sensory substitution to unsettle the assumption that human vision gives a complete account of the surroundings. As visual certainty decreases and tactile attention grows, the experience invites meditative wandering: perception develops through movement, contact, and responsiveness to the environment.

The conceptual framework connects embodied exploration, relational sensing, and tentacular thinking.

Tracing how visual priority becomes embedded in interfaces and everyday perceptual habits.

Inspiration: the star-nosed mole

The star-nosed mole’s distinctive nose has 22 fleshy appendages. Its tactile anatomy offers both a visual reference for the glove and a starting point for imagining perception organized around active touch. FeltSight translates that inspiration into a human gesture: the wrists stay close together while the fingers fan outward to explore space.

The glove extends this gesture into a field of remote touch. Its soft radial form draws attention to fine finger movements and to the space between the hands and nearby surfaces. The biological reference therefore informs the appearance of the object, the wearer’s posture, and the experience of navigating through tactile cues.

Biological references assembled during the design process.

System: from surroundings to fingertips

The system couples environmental sensing and hand tracking on Apple Vision Pro with a custom pair of wireless gloves. The headset tracks surrounding geometry and fingertip poses, associates surfaces with material textures, and sends haptic commands over Bluetooth Low Energy. Electronics in the gloves turn those commands into vibrations at individual fingertips.

The MR application combines depth sensing with image-based material recognition. At each fingertip’s remote contact point, it selects a texture from the recorded material library and updates the playback parameters according to motion and distance. The glove’s controller receives these per-finger commands, prepares the audio waveform, and drives the corresponding actuator through its amplifier.

The experience forms a continuous loop: move a hand, reveal a surface, feel its texture, and adjust the next movement. The visual and tactile responses refer to the same remote point of contact, allowing an object to be explored before the wearer’s hand reaches it.

System overview: hand movement links environmental sensing, the XR display, and tactile feedback.

Glove design

Soft pink silicone gives the gloves their radial, tentacular shape while allowing the fingers to bend. Each finger has its own vibrotactile actuator, positioned using an adjustable mount to accommodate different hand sizes. Transparent TPU straps hold the gloves in place while leaving the backs of the fingers visible to the headset’s tracking cameras.

The pair provides ten independently actuated fingertip contacts. Sliding mounts allow each actuator to align with the wearer’s fingertip pad, while the flexible silicone supports bending and small exploratory motions. The joined-wrist, splayed-finger posture makes the hands work together as a single expanding sensory organ.

The wearable electronics include an ESP32-C3 Bluetooth controller, a Teensy 4.1 controller for audio-based haptic rendering, amplification, and battery power. The design brings these components into the palm and wrist assembly so that exploratory movement can remain centered on the hands.

Component placement, fingertip actuators, and transparent straps.

Exploded construction drawings, the sensing-to-actuation workflow, and successive glove prototypes.

XR experience: a temporary field of light

Inside the headset, the environment starts dark. Exploratory gestures reveal nearby surfaces as points of light, which gradually fade after the hands move away. The remaining points provide a brief perceptual memory of where the wearer has explored.

The interface removes the continuous camera view of the surroundings. Its point clouds show fragments encountered through the hands, requiring renewed exploration as the visual trace fades. This reduced reality keeps visual feedback closely tied to tactile attention, instead of supplying a persistent overview of the scene.

The angle between the palms changes the size of this visible region. Opening the palms expands the field; closing them concentrates attention nearer the hands. Fingertip rays and colored contact markers connect each hand movement to a surface in the point cloud.

The headset view: surfaces emerge as transient particles around the exploring hands.

Palm angle controls the visible field, from approximately half a meter to one meter in diameter.

Haptic experience: textures at a distance

The tactile library begins with recordings made by rubbing a contact microphone across physical materials. Their vibration patterns are replayed through the glove’s actuators, giving each surface a different tactile character.

Recordings of surfaces such as bark, metal, and glass preserve variations in the timing and frequency of material vibrations. When the system identifies a surface, it selects the associated recording and renders that waveform at the relevant fingertip. The sensation comes from recorded surface behavior, with movement-dependent playback shaping how it is felt.

Two mappings connect the response to the wearer’s movements. Finger speed changes playback speed, while proximity changes vibration amplitude. A faster sweep produces a faster texture pattern; moving closer increases its strength. These changing sensations evoke the movement and pressure of a fingertip sliding across a surface, even while that surface remains out of reach.

This coupling makes active exploration essential. Sensory detail is revealed by moving the fingers; stillness quiets the response. The wearer continually adjusts a gesture in relation to the changing feedback, forming a perception–action loop between the body and surrounding materials.

Recording material vibrations and translating them into fingertip feedback.

Finger velocity and distance modulate the tactile response.

Experience in the forest

For the experience documented in the 2025 paper, ten participants aged 22–45 explored a mixed-deciduous forest in sessions of approximately 20 minutes. Video recordings and subsequent interviews followed their movements and their accounts of the experience.

Reaching into the surrounding forest with the haptic gloves.

Sensory rupture

The accounts describe an initial loss of familiar visual orientation. In the darkness, participants could no longer rely on a broad view of the forest to direct their movements. Reaching out became a way to discover the next small region of space. One participant compared this exploration to finding a way through a dark cave with a torch. Slower, more deliberate movement emerged as participants learned to attend to the feedback.

Extended body schema

Some participants described a sense of reaching beyond their physical fingers. A surface could be felt while remaining outside ordinary touching distance, producing the impression of an extended hand. One participant related this sensation to the rubber hand illusion. Walking paths also became less direct: changing textures encouraged detours and pauses, making navigation responsive to local sensations.

XR meditative wandering

One participant who practiced walking meditation reflected on the difference between attending through the soles of the feet and attending through the hands. The dark field and softly fading particles encouraged concentration on small movements and nearby textures. In this account, the restricted visual world created a space for attentive wandering and a different relation to an already familiar practice.

Sensory reprioritization and body mechanics

Participants repeatedly bent or crouched toward the ground, using their hands to investigate the space near their feet and around tree trunks. These postures brought the whole body into the task of sensing. As visual guidance receded, tactile exploration began to organize movement, suggesting a temporary redistribution of attention across the senses.

Bending, probing, and exploring near the ground during the forest experience.

The paper presents these observations as an initial exploration. Longer-term sensory changes, shared experiences, and use in other environments remain directions for further work.

Exhibitions and presentations

IEEE VISAP 2025 · Vienna

FeltSight was exhibited in the IEEE VISAP 2025 Art Gallery. The exhibition photographs document visitors trying the gloves, exploring different hand positions, and bringing their attention toward the space immediately around them.

Exploring FeltSight at the IEEE VISAP 2025 Art Gallery in Vienna.

Visitors exploring through small hand movements and changes in posture.

The wearable system in use in the gallery.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 · Hong Kong

Danlin Huang presented the project as an Art Paper at SIGGRAPH Asia 2025, connecting the glove design and mixed reality experience with observations from the forest sessions.

Presenting the forest experience and demonstrating the exploratory hand gesture.

Danlin Huang at the Art Papers presentation in Hong Kong.

Publications

• 2026 — Designing “FeltSight”: Feeling the World Like a Star-Nosed Mole. Proceedings of the 2026 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’26). Singapore. Full Paper. [→]
• 2025 — Becoming Mole with “FeltSight”: Hyper-sensitizing the Surrounding through Mixed Reality Haptic Proximity Gloves. SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Art Papers. Hong Kong. Art Paper. [→]

Demonstrations

• 2026 — Touch Beyond Reach: Demonstrating Star-Nosed Mole-Inspired Mixed Reality Haptic Proximity Gloves. Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’26). Barcelona, Spain. Demo. [→]
• 2026 — FeltSight. 2026 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW). Daegu, Korea. [→]
• 2025 — Demonstrating “FeltSight”: Star-nosed Mole-inspired Mixed Reality Haptic Gloves. 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct). Daejeon, Korea. Demo. [→]

@inproceedings{Huang_2025,
  series={SA Art Papers ’25},
  title={Becoming Mole with “FeltSight”: Hyper-sensitizing the Surrounding through Mixed Reality Haptic Proximity Gloves},
  url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3757369.3767605},
  DOI={10.1145/3757369.3767605},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Art Papers},
  publisher={ACM},
  author={Huang, Danlin and Hu, Botao Amber and Zhang, Dong and Liu, Yifei and Yoshida, Takatoshi and Lin, Rem RunGu},
  year={2025},
  month=Dec,
  pages={1–11},
  collection={SA Art Papers ’25}
}