Immersing yourself in full virtual fantasy worlds has always been the holy grail of VR and AR gaming. But high resolution headsets and better spatial audio have gone a long way toward making visual enticements that are more enticing, resulting in sharper, clearer images that do a more or less visually faithful take on the real world followed by the often transcendent complementary audio telling those images where in space to appear as sound. But haptic feedback in a sense of touch sort of way? And that’s a frontier that has been a little further from where most beating, most accessible fingertips have been. 8 years out in 2025/26, and advances in haptic technology that goes far beyond the vibratory feedback’ that we’ve seen in things like the haptic feedback of controllers, to full-body immersion across a myriad of surfaces – is going to be the game changer in just how we interact with digital worlds and play games.
For years, haptic feedback in gaming was little more than a rumble pack in a controller, and a crude one at that, offering a blunt approximation of impact or texture. That was good enough for basic signaling but left the world of touch nearly untouched. With a haptic revolution just around the corner – All the high end haptic suits, gloves and room scale systems will be available within18 months, that will change everything about how we think about VR and AR.
The Evolution of Haptic Feedback: From Vibrations to Full Sensations
The progress in haptic feedback is multi-dimensional, comprising many modalities that can be used to emulate realism of touch:
- Vibrational Haptics 2.0: It’s the same stuff, but resolution and depth are vastly improved. LRAs are also getting higher-accuracy and can access a wider frequency and amplitude range than an E-ERM. Such a technique allows for haptic sensations such as, but not limited to, the vibration of a piece of machinery to the impact of a bullet. In 2025-2026, we are going to see them baked in to not just controllers, but more advanced wearables.
- Kinesthetic Haptics (Force Feedback): OK we are starting to get to the meat of (feeling) virtual objects. Haptic gloves and exosuits, on the other hand, use motors and other mechanisms that can provide resistance and pressure, and sometimes even a virtual feeling of weight. You can reach out, sense the weight of a sword, or trace along the contours of a wall and sense it push back against you. SenseGlove and Teslasuit are leading the way with consumer and business products that feature actual resistance – all of which make using VR that much more believable.
- Thermoelectric Haptics: This is another new frontier, to model heating and cooling. Units may be manufactured which heat or cool selective small areas of skin providing a yet another level of realism. What will happen if we add heat from a virtual fire in a VR/AR game, cold from a blizzard in the game and heat from an energy blast at the character? This technology, however, is just coming of age for the mass consumer market and is being used in niches.
- Electrotactile Enhancement: It allows tactile information to be presented to the skin through low-frequency electrical stimulation. This can be extremely subtle, creating textures like thick concrete or even the prickling feeling of raindrops. Many early designs have been uncomfortable, but over time there has been a soft nudging of this until we have force feedback gloves that are a bit less invasive to wear.
- Mid-Air Haptics (Ultrasonic Transducers): A super futuristic concept, mid-air haptics work by using focused ultrasound waves to simulate the sensation of touch on the skin without any physical contact. Imagine feeling a virtual insect flitting too near your hand or inputting commands on a holographic control panel and receiving buzzing, ticking feedback against your fingertips that don’t actually reach the wall display. This tech is still very much in the experimental stage, but it also hints at some awesome potential for new AR experiences where physical touching could be awkward.
Full-Body Immersion: Stepping into the Virtual World
But more than our hands is the ambition for 2025-2026: immersion from head to toe. This would bring haptic feedback across our entire body, where we can feel the virtual world react to us and us to it.
- Haptic Suits and Vests: Devices like the currently-available bHaptics TactSuit do excellent work in coordinating chest and back haptic feedback, teaching players to discern impacts, vibrations, maybe even directional cues (i.e., being shot in the left side). The next generation of these suits will have a greater number of feedback points, with higher-fidelity actuators, more comfortable, lighter designs, and be made from a wider array of materials. You’ll sense the raindrops on your shoulders, the weight of a fall, or the ground shake from an explosion miles away.
- Haptic Footwear and Gloves: You’ll be outfitted with special footwear using haptics that simulate walking on various surfaces (gravel, sand, water), along with more advanced gloves to simulate gripping various things (weapons, tree bark). The physical feeling that on top of all of that being fleshed out with these peripherals and full body tracking is unmatched.
- Environmental Haptics: This is a tougher space but there are some interesting things going on. Imagine dedicated gaming rooms with floor haptics that shake to simulate tremors or footfalls, or fans that blow in response to on-screen weather effects. Implications: Not something for everybody’s living room, but specialist VR arcades (and bespoke gaming rooms) will increasingly leverage these environmental cues for full immersion.
- Motion Platforms: Again, not haptics as such, but certainly they can form part of a full body immersion experience by making you feel movement, inertia and even elevation. With increasingly advanced haptics, these platforms can provide extraordinarily convincing sensations of driving, flying or even walking over treacherous land.
The Impact on VR/AR Gaming in 2025-2026
How full-body immersion and haptic feedback are set to revolutionize VR/AR gaming in the near future:
- Unreal Touch: New expressions of reality in a home console immersive haptic feedback, dynamic adaptive triggers and a built-in microphone, all integrated into an iconic comfortable design. Games would no longer be just something you hear and see, but something you feel. Here is where it truly becomes game changing for stuff like fear, sims action you could possibly receive yourself involved with. In regular virtual reality, you’re never going to experience the coldness of an actual icy zombie grip, the recoil of a solid rifle, or the pull of climbing a 3D rock wall.
- Gameplay Strategies: It’s an invitation to use new gameplay strategies, millennials!(?) And the haptics are great for that. Keep the game close and at just the right angle with the included media controller and built-in phone holderEasy Adjustment: Effortlessly adjust the headset to your most comfortable setting and enjoy the ultimate virtual reality experience with in able lenses and a soft nose pieceImmersive Experience: Become the ultimate enemy, explore virtual worlds and more with our experience kit by feeling the sound of an enemy creeping up behind you or the ground shake when a car blows up and is sent hurtling downward in the gameInvasion is coming. This is a big deal in fast-paced action games, where a single nickname and how quickly and accurately you can respond could potentially win or lose a game for your squad.
- Increased Emotional Attachment: Touch is associated with human emotions. Sensing a reassuring pat, a rough blow or warmth is powerful, directly connecting the sense of touch with emotions and making virtual characters and things in a game or movie that much more real and engaging. Actually great for storytelling, and social VR in general.
- Accessibility and Training: In addition to gaming, more advanced haptics are crucial for accessibility (e.g., by providing tactile feedback to visually-impaired users) and for realistic training simulations in numerous domains (e.g., in surgery and military drills). Aesthetic-overlapping-features-that-any-Gamer-could-like.
- New Genres and Experiences: Closure to That Early Vision of VR/AR: We’ll be ushered a step closer to the original VR/AR vision, with the arrival of entirely new game genres for VR/AR games, centered around sensory experiences, and exploration, and maybe even therapy. Imagine a game about touch and feel of different materials or a game moving unique animals with touch or a game explaining meditation using touch.
- The Dawn of “Mixed Reality” Haptics: As AR glasses get better, haptic feedback will link digital overlays to real-world objects. Imagine an AR game in which a virtual critter is in your living room and you can “feel” it walk across the real table or a digital object you can seemingly “grasp” onto in your hand. The line between the physical world and this cross-patterning of physical and textile haptics will blur even more.
Challenges and the Road Ahead
However, there remain certain challenges in these progresses. But cost, comfort, and the feasibility to merge are among the major challenges to the more mainstream expansion of full body haptics to consumers. (these new sensory inputs) “Developers also need to figure out how to design games that can take advantage of these new sensory inputs without overwhelming the player or inducing “haptic fatigue. Furthermore, the standardisation of haptic interfaces will be crucial in helping compatibility across different hardware vendors.
However, the trajectory is clear. In 2025-2026, we will finally succeed in realizing a breakthrough in haptic feedback -no more a mere peripheral- to accompany us in an immersive VR/AR world. Interesting to see how that technology grows and gets cheaper over the years, the line between the real world and the virtual world will become more and more blurred to the point of revolution in full body, multi-sensory gaming. Prepare to see the future of gaming… not with your eyes nor your ears, but with your mind.