Inside Valley – The metaverse you can touch
The metaverse has so far been purely audiovisual. A Silicon Valley start-up wants to change that – making virtual worlds tangible.
In this episode of Inside Valley I test a device that is supposed to make the metaverse tangible. So far the virtual world is audiovisual – image and sound. A start-up in California is working on adding haptics: textures, resistance, surfaces that feel real.
What is at stake
The metaverse is one of tech’s biggest bets of the early 2020s. Mark Zuckerberg has renamed Facebook as Meta and is reorganising the entire company around the idea. So far everything runs through eyes and ears – VR headsets deliver the image, headphones the sound. But a fully realised virtual world needs more. If you touch a stone texture, you should be able to feel it. If you step onto soft sand, you should sense the resistance.
What the tech demos show
Several companies in Silicon Valley are working on haptic feedback. Gloves with microscopic pressure elements, touchscreens that can simulate different surface textures depending on what is being displayed. The demos are striking, but honestly not yet ready. The line between “interesting” and “gimmick” is sometimes thin – and the devices are expensive, bulky and unsuitable for everyday use. But every iteration points in a clear direction.
Why this is strategically important
The metaverse hype is fragile. Virtual land for 450,000 dollars, virtual villas for private investors, digital fashion: much of it sounds like speculation. But the underlying technology – faster chips, better displays, more precise sensors, tactile surfaces – is real. The more it develops, the more the metaverse could shift from novelty to infrastructure on which companies run real workflows: training, product demos, remote maintenance, collaboration.
What Europe could gain
While US companies like Meta pour many billions into the virtual world, Europe is largely watching and waiting. Yet Germany in particular has industrial expertise that could be combined with metaverse technology: mechanical engineering, precision mechanics, haptics research in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. The big question is not so much whether the metaverse arrives in its current form – but who builds the tools we work with inside it.
I wrote the full metaverse piece for Handelsblatt.