🎮 What if you could actually feel the weight of a virtual object in your hands?

Japanese startup Diver-X has acquired the business license for EXOS, a force feedback device. The shift is from haptics that merely signal "you touched something" with a buzz, to hardware that pushes back against your hand. And the ambition reaches well past VR and the metaverse, into robot teleoperation and Physical AI. Here's a look at the leading edge of Japan's haptics scene.

Who Diver-X is

Diver-X Inc. is an XR interface startup founded in March 2021, based in Tokyo's Chiyoda ward. CEO Yamato Sakoda, born in 2002, founded it with Kei Asano straight out of high school. He was picked for the fourth cohort of the Masayoshi Son Foundation and named a Super Creator under Japan's government-backed Mitou IT talent program.

Its flagship product, ContactGlove, is a glove-type VR controller with haptic feedback. It won an Innovation Award in the virtual reality category at CES 2023, the world's largest consumer electronics show. In June 2024, it closed a pre-Series A of roughly 200 million yen (about $1.25 million), combining a share issue to Toyota Boshoku, PKSHA Capital and others with a loan from Japan Finance Corporation.

What EXOS is

The EXOS series was originally built by exiii Inc., a startup that first made its name with low-cost, 3D-printed myoelectric prosthetic hands. It later pivoted to haptic reproduction for VR and AR.

What sets EXOS apart is that it doesn't lean on the vibration motors most VR haptic gear uses. Instead, an exoskeleton paired with motors delivers actual force back to the hand. Where a buzz only tells you that contact happened, EXOS lets you feel hardness, weight, and give: the resistance of gripping a steering wheel, the heft of lifting a loaded box inside VR.

After exiii dissolved, the EXOS intellectual property passed to Crosstech Management.

Why acquire it now

Building ContactGlove, Diver-X kept hitting a wall. Skin-level tactile feedback alone cannot reproduce real-world resistance or weight.

When you grab something, the sensation comes from two sources at once: touch on the skin, and force acting on muscles and tendons. Convinced that genuine immersion needs both, the company acquired the EXOS business license on December 1, 2025.

The deal covers:

  • The full intellectual property portfolio
  • EXOS Wrist, which applies force feedback at the wrist
  • A five-finger haptic glove that recreates fingertip sensation
  • Hand Unit, a base unit for robot hands

The target is Physical AI

The telling detail is that Diver-X isn't stopping at VR and the metaverse. It has explicitly named robot teleoperation and Physical AI as where this is headed.

"Physical AI" is the term NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang pushed at CES 2025, meaning AI that perceives, reasons, and acts in the physical world. Where generative AI produces text and images, Physical AI works through a body: a robot, an autonomous vehicle. At the iREX2025 international robot exhibition in December, Japanese heavyweights like FANUC and Yaskawa put Physical AI front and center, a sign the whole industry is turning a corner.

Touch matters here. For a robot to handle delicate work the way a person does, it needs feedback from contact, not just cameras and microphones. And when a human teleoperates a robot to gather training data for humanoids, force feedback in the operator's hand yields more natural, more precise motion data.

A note from exiii's founder

Hiroshi Yamaura, exiii's former CEO and now head of Curious Robotics, said in the press release that as Physical AI and humanoids take off, the building-block technologies developed in XR are closely tied to that wave. After roughly five years, he added, he is glad to see that work inherited within Japan and carried into its next chapter.

Japan's footing in haptics

In haptics, US firm HaptX and South Korea's bHaptics got there first. But Japan has its own footing: deep shop-floor know-how and motion data from decades of industrial robotics. If the touch technology refined in VR can carry over to robots and Physical AI, that is where the advantage shows. The EXOS handover is one step in that direction.

What about your country?

How far along is haptics and VR hardware where you live? And when it comes to robots and AI entering daily life, do you feel more excitement or more unease? Tell us in the comments.

Update: On July 1, 2026, Diver-X changed its corporate name to Melt Interface Technologies Inc. The move, announced on June 24, 2026, came with a reorganization into three lines: Contact for XR and robotics interfaces, Melt Interface for general-purpose input devices, and Solutions for B2B contract development.

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