Emerge, a virtual social networking company that focuses on building within the metaverse, today announced the launch of the Emerge Home system, which allows you to use your hands in the metaverse. In anticipation of the launch of Emerge Home, Emerge also raised an additional $13 million from strategic investors to finalize product development and support its early adopter community.

It’s the company’s first product to enable an immersive, bare-handed touch experience, and co-founders Sly Lee and Isaac Castro demonstrated it Wednesday at our GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse 2 online event.

A recent study by the National Research Group, which uncovered consumer views of the metaverse, found that most are excited about the metaverse, but 78% of consumers say that “when I interact with people virtually, I miss the ability to touching them and physically interacting with them. ”

Online, we miss nonverbal cues, sensory experiences, and ways of feeling things together. As virtual worlds become the epicenter of shared social experiences, they still lack a key pillar of our human experience: the ability to use our bare hands to physically feel, interact and connect with those we care about most, our “inner circles”. Emerge, he said.

The Emerge Home system consists of three components: the Emerge Wave-1 device, the Emerge Home social virtual experience, and the Emerge Home mobile app. The Emerge Wave-1 is a new tabletop device that invites your bare hands to be its controllers.

About the same size as a 13-inch laptop, it emits sculpted ultrasonic waves that allow users to feel and interact
through touch in the virtual world. Using Emerge’s patented technology, the Emerge Wave-1 creates an interaction field in the air up to three feet above the device and 120 degrees around it.

“Emerge represents the next paradigm shift in human interaction,” said Lee, co-CEO of Emerge, in a statement. “The goal of Emerge Home is to take people beyond the screen and allow them to connect emotionally in a natural way, no matter the distance between them.”

Emerge is creating a family of products that make it possible for users to physically feel bare-handed touch experiences in a virtual space without the need for gloves, controllers, or wearable devices.

“Emerge Home is the first step in a larger journey to create a new tactile language in the virtual world,” Castro, co-CEO of Emerge, said in a statement. “We are starting with virtual reality today and exploring other interfaces in the near future. Instead of trying to replicate the feel of reality, Emerge focuses on communicating emotion through virtual tactile experiences.”

Notable new investors bringing capital and unique expertise include EpyllionCo’s Matthew Ball, Trousdale Ventures, Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, MEMS expert Kurt Petersen, and patent firm Schox. These investors joined Emerge’s previous investors, including M13 and Vulcan Capital.

The Emerge Home system and the Emerge Wave-1 device will be publicly available in February on Kickstarter, retailing for $500 for a limited time.