Hitting YouTube's front page with Smarter Every Day

The year was 2018, and the Ready Player One movie was set to premiere in the spring. Not long before, no one had ever heard of “haptic gloves.” Now they were front and center of the poster for Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster.

Destin Sandlin, the YouTuber behind Smarter Every Day, posted about his interest in haptic gloves, and we pounced on the opportunity.

We engineered Destin’s visit to HaptX’s San Luis Obispo engineering lab. At the time his channel had 5.6M subscribers (it’s north of 10M as I write this today). Many of his subscribers are engineers and technologists. This was an opportunity to drive recruiting and build awareness among a tech savvy audience.

The opportunity came with considerable risk: Destin is a vocal skeptic of virtual reality. He’d be doing an on-camera demo of our VR glove prototype, so there was a possibility he’d trash our technology in front of his subscribers. However, we believed our glove would turn Destin into a VR believer. Turns our we were right.

Destin produced not one, but two videos about the visit. The videos combined for 30-minutes of in-depth coverage about HaptX, the science of touch, and the engineering behind our gloves.

The front pages of YouTube and Reddit

The video skyrocketed to the front page of r/videos and to the front page of YouTube. It wound up being the #7 trending video for the day. Some outlets even covered the video, highlighting that the HaptX Glove turned Destin into a VR believer. Right now the videos have >4M combined views.