[haptic1216]

The technology to simulate texture with that amount of detail does not exist yet. HaptX has a few dozen tiny pneumatic pistons poking your hand in various places and that's about the best thing available today.

The industry has really only found use in training so far. But it's pretty promising in my opinion.

As to efficacy, I don't know if there have been rigorous studies yet, the industry is still pretty new. But anecdotally we do see that users build better muscle memory that reduces training time with real world equipment.

The idea is generally to have users do their first round of training virtually instead of with real equipment. Then they require less time with the real equipment and don't make newbie mistakes that break things.

You'd be surprised at just how poor quality the haptics can be and still be convincing. VR has some interesting psychological effects that make your perception of the haptics much better than it actually is. What you see can actually override your proprioception to a large enough degree that we can get away with not being so precise.