Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles trials haptic VR gloves for van assembly training

Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, VW's light-commercial-vehicle division, began testing SenseGlove Nova haptic force-feedback VR gloves in 2021 to improve the realism of its assembly-line pre-training program and reduce the need for trainees to access expensive pre-production vehicles in the company's professional showroom. In the published case study, trainees used the gloves to virtually install a sliding door on a Volkswagen T6 van. Where VR controllers previously prevented trainees from naturally grabbing, releasing, or feeling the size and density of parts, the haptic glove — using tendon-driven force feedback, vibrotactile actuators, and motion-capture tracking — let trainees feel assemblable parts, sense collisions when joining components, and feel vibration from tools such as a drill. In SenseGlove's case study, Volkswagen trainer Marcos Antelo Barrio reported that all trainees completing the T6 exercise found the gloves more realistic than controllers. The source does not state the sample size or establish measured learning or productivity improvements. Volkswagen's Head of Production System, Friedrich Mattiszik, said the aim is to make pre-training as realistic as possible both to save time, since employees can train without traveling to the physical showroom, and to protect the expensive pre-series vehicles kept there for qualification. The training is intended as preparation before trainees carry out the learned hand movements on real commercial vehicles.