As explained by UploadVR, the idea is that you’d wear one Tasbi unit on each wrist, letting you get a sensation when you pick up objects, push buttons or touch a surface. Apparently, even though your fingers aren’t touching anything, Tasbi is smart enough to make you think you are. Sadly, Tasbi doesn’t do hand / finger / skeleton tracking, and so would have to be combined with a computer vision sensor.

It remains to be seen if Tasbi would work for everyone, and Facebook promises to publish its research paper on the device in the near future. But it’s heartening to know that companies are looking at ways to bridge one of the biggest divides between us and what we see on screen. Although, in the near future, it’s likely that we’ll be using gloves, similar to those made by Bebop, to feel things that aren’t there.

Other projects are more clever than pragmatic, but they could still have their uses. The Voice of Netflix uses a neural network to grab dialogue from streaming shows and turn them into new sentences on demand. If you want to hear characters from The Crown recite something silly, you can. TerraVision helps show producers find locations by matching one of their photos to a library of location shots. And no, Get Out! isn’t a Jordan Peele nod — it’s a tool that plays awards show walk-off music in any Netflix meeting room to let people know when they’ve overstayed their welcome.

As with other Hack Days, we wouldn’t expect most if any of these efforts to become part of Netflix’s service. Project Rumble Pak does show that the company is interested in experiences beyond sight and sound, though, and we could see it happening if Netflix wants to drive more viewers to its mobile apps.

The patent drawings look similar to the current Xbox One controller, with the addition of paddles along the bottom that would allow players to enter text or commands via Braille. The paddles would also vibrate to provide outputs in Braille. Those might, for instance, communicate what’s happening on the screen or relay text conversations. The patent also mentions a Braille accessory that might be removable and could provide additional Braille input and output capabilities. In the drawings, that accessory appears to be a small, rectangular patch on the back of the device.

Of course, this is only a patent application. There’s no guarantee Microsoft will ever fully develop the device, but it would be a novel and likely welcome product. At the very least, this shows Microsoft isn’t done dreaming up adaptive controllers.