Manus

Manus
Information
Industry	Virtual reality, motion capture, robotics
Founded	2014
Founder	Bob Vlemmix, Stephan van den Brink, Tim van Veenendaal
Headquarters	Geldrop, Netherlands
Products	Data gloves, finger-tracking and haptic gloves, full-body motion capture
Website	https://www.manus-meta.com

Manus (stylized MANUS; legally MANUS Technology Group, and also marketed as Manus Meta), founded in 2014 as Manus Machina, is a Dutch company that develops high-precision data gloves for Virtual Reality, Motion capture, and robotics. Its products track the movement of the wearer's hands and fingers and translate them into a digital model, and several of its gloves add haptic vibration feedback. The company is based in Geldrop, near Eindhoven, in the Netherlands.

The company began with the goal of letting people control Virtual Reality experiences with their bare hands instead of a handheld controller. Over time its focus shifted from consumer VR gaming toward enterprise and professional uses, and by the mid-2020s Manus positioned its gloves as tools for collecting human interaction data used in motion capture, AR/VR training, robot teleoperation, and the training of artificial intelligence systems. The company says its hardware is used by more than 2,000 robotics companies, AI research labs, XR developers, and motion capture studios.

History

Manus was founded in the Netherlands in July 2014 under the name Manus Machina by Bob Vlemmix, Stephan van den Brink, and Tim van Veenendaal, shortly before that year's Gamescom trade show. Co-founder Bob Vlemmix demonstrated an early prototype glove at a Dutch VR meetup during Gamescom 2014; press at the time described the rig as having "wires everywhere," but the response was positive. The startup grew to around 15 employees by May 2015 and showed a wireless glove at E3 2015, using onboard inertial measurement units (IMUs) to track hand and finger motion without an external optical system.

Early development kits, marketed as the Manus VR glove, were offered to developers, and in 2016 the company added arm tracking to its software. Rather than building dedicated arm sensors, the system strapped HTC Vive controllers to the wearer's arms and used inverse kinematics, together with the headset position, to reconstruct the position of the arms and elbows in real time.

According to the company's own timeline, Manus released its first Development Kit gloves (DK1) in 2016, followed by DK2 in 2017 and the Prime I gloves, which added haptic feedback, in 2018. That same year it began working with motion capture firms Xsens and OptiTrack. It built its first full-body capture prototype, Polygon, in 2019, released the Prime II gloves in 2020, and introduced the Prime X series in 2021 while opening additional offices in Eindhoven, Germany, and the United States.

In 2022 the company launched the Quantum Metagloves, a major change in its tracking approach (see Technology), and in 2023 it released the Prime 3 Haptic XR and Prime 3 Mocap gloves along with a Quantum Bodypack for full-body capture. Later products include the Metagloves Pro (2024) and the Metagloves Pro Haptic (2025). As its market moved toward robotics and embodied AI, the company adopted the Manus Meta name and the manus-meta.com domain, and it now frames its gloves as a way to capture high-fidelity human hand data for teaching robots to manipulate objects and for training AI on human demonstrations.

Technology

Manus's earliest gloves relied on bend (flex) sensors and IMUs to estimate the pose of each finger. That approach remains in the Prime line: the Manus Prime 3 Haptic XR, for example, uses five 2-degree-of-freedom flexible sensors together with six 9-degree-of-freedom IMUs per glove, integrated vibrotactile haptics, a quoted signal latency of 7.5 milliseconds or less, about 12 hours of battery life, and roughly a 3-hour USB-C recharge.

The 2022 Quantum Metagloves moved to a magnetic tracking system. A magnetic base sits on the back of the hand, and a module on each fingertip is sensed within that field, returning fingertip position and finger angles. Manus quotes Hall-effect fingertip sensors with a sample rate of 120 Hz and a signal latency of 7.5 milliseconds or less. Because the fingertips are tracked directly, the gloves measure absolute finger length and width once calibrated, which lets the software scale a skeletal hand model to each user. Magnetic tracking also holds up well when fingers touch each other or the palm, situations where camera-based hand tracking tends to fail; the main drawbacks are that holding metallic or electronic objects can disturb the signal, and that the custom parts make the gloves expensive. Up to eight gloves can be used near one another without interfering.

Manus gloves are designed to plug into professional pipelines. They work with SteamVR and OpenXR, support full-body positional tracking by pairing with systems such as Vive trackers, OptiTrack, or Xsens, and integrate with engines and design tools including Unity, Unreal Engine, and VRED.

Products

Product	Year	Type	Notes
Development Kit (DK1)	2016	Finger-tracking gloves	First developer gloves; flex sensors and IMUs, evolved from the 2014-2015 Manus Machina prototypes
Development Kit 2 (DK2)	2017	Finger-tracking gloves	Improved VR functionality
Prime I	2018	Haptic gloves	First Manus gloves with haptic feedback; year the company partnered with Xsens and OptiTrack
Polygon	2019 (prototype)	Full-body motion capture	First full-body capture prototype; later opened to the creative community
Prime II	2020	Finger-tracking gloves	Released alongside a SteamVR Pro Tracker
Prime X series	2021	Finger-tracking gloves	Released as the company opened offices in Eindhoven, Germany, and the US
Quantum Metagloves	2022	Magnetic finger-tracking gloves	Hall-effect fingertip tracking at 120 Hz, latency 7.5 ms or less; enterprise/mocap focus; about 9,000 US dollars (7,500 euros) per pair at launch
Manus Prime 3 Haptic XR	2023	Haptic VR gloves	5x 2DoF flex sensors and 6x 9DoF IMUs per glove; vibrotactile haptics; ~12 h battery; latency 7.5 ms or less
Prime 3 Mocap	2023	Motion capture gloves	Mocap-focused variant of the Prime 3 line
Quantum Bodypack	2023	Full-body motion capture	Body-tracking pack to pair with the gloves
Metagloves Pro	2024	Magnetic finger-tracking gloves	Successor in the Quantum/Metagloves line
Metagloves Pro Haptic	2025	Magnetic haptic gloves	Combines EMF-based finger tracking with real-time vibrotactile feedback

Reception and market position

Manus is regularly described in the XR press as one of the leading makers of professional finger-tracking and motion capture gloves, and Road to VR noted that its magnetic Quantum Metagloves promised "new levels of finger tracking accuracy" compared with the IMU-and-flex-sensor gloves that came before. The high price of the Quantum line, around 9,000 US dollars per pair, reflects the custom hardware and a deliberate focus on enterprise, studio, and research customers rather than mainstream consumers. As the broader industry turned toward robotics and embodied AI in the mid-2020s, Manus repositioned its gloves as data-capture tools for those fields, citing use by more than 2,000 robotics companies, AI labs, XR developers, and motion capture studios.