Data Glove That Turns Gestures Into Commands

ravidew writes: "Three students at Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center, University of California, have built a motion-sensing glove that can transmit hand gestures to a PC. Within 3 years they hope to build sensors that are no bigger than 1mm and can be glued to each fingernail. Now you can really tell Windows what you think ..." While you're at the Sensor and Actuator Center, check out Kris Pister's smart dust.

Ahh, the possibilities

[FireFlux]

Tactile pornography, online boxing matches and virtual crocheting, the list just goes on. Now we can implement real skills into all those rpgs so people can make their godly platemail of the minotaur with their "own hands". Though I have this strange feeling that we'll see a lot of script kiddies doing the whole Johnny Mnemonic thing: "I can crash your system from here man" and skinning over their gloves with claws.

Nintendo Power Glove, anyone?

[fifthchild]

This looks familiar...

Can I play Super Mario Bros. with this one? :)

One a serious note, while it looks pretty cool, you can't help but think it will prove to be less useful than the traditional methods "used to decipher and translate hand gestures into computer interepreted symbols". Still, it's only there to prove it could be done. Who among the programmers out there wants to tell me if they;d find this useful?

Say Goodbye to the Keyboard

[Trekie8472]

If this catches on, we'll be typing with sign language.

Not very useful

[Quasar1999]

I rather have voice recognition than hand gesture recognition... Its such a pain to gesture to a computer... Remember the 'Black and white' (game) gesturing thing... it took so long to get it to actually recognize the gestures... and there were only a few and they were only 2D... a human uses hundreds if not thousands of gestures that are very similiar... I really wouldn't want to be the person designing the software to interpret the gestures...

Anyone out there do this sort of programming? How hard is it to get a computer to understand complex gestures???

I think I played with this:

[Migelikor1]

I don't know if anyone else remembers the powerglove, one of the silliest things nintendo ever released. The original nintendo system had the ability to accept remarkably versatile input, from a whole range of weapons (actually crappy cameras) to the tactile sensative power glove, power pad, and even a device that sensed hand position in midair with infrared(it folded open like a laptop and sensed the airspace above it.) I actually had the powerglove, and you know what? It was rather useless. No way making gestures is simpler than well placed keys. Anyone here who codes should understand that more mouse movement=less efficiency. I'd say that for now, we have to play on the computers' terms, and use a simple system relying on muscle memory that contains no ambiguity. Maybe eventually the computers can learn to understand subvocalized commands (like in the ender Quintet by Orsen Scott Card) or even mental ones, but until then, I'm afraid that the simpler the system, the better it will work. Mike Tyson's Punch Out really sucked when you actually had to punch with the glove!

Re:Say Goodbye to the Keyboard

[Quizme2000]

Actually I saw an experimental device that was a glove that wrote out sign language to a LED screen and also had voice recongition. A 13yr old kid made(?) it for a science fair. His idea was that deaf people could "talk" to others.

Re:I think I played with this:

[WinterSolstice]

Wow, I haven't thought of that game in a few years :)

I seem to recall REALLY stinking at it...

On topic, however, I think these have a lot more use than a power glove. I can see where major motions might be needed at first, but eventually they could detect millimeter finger travel, allowing for a 2.1 Million Key Keyboard, or some such.

Of course, the best use is for operator controlled surgical/mechanical machines. Being able to duplicate the finesse of an expert in an environment that a human could never operate in would be wonderful.

-WS

The next level of interface.

[Nijika]

We have to get away from these keyboards. If you think about it, it's not as natural as gestures. Imagine coding in sign-language...um, you'd get used to it.

Anyway, I have a feeling, like gasoline, television and so many other legacy tools that are so entrenched in our lives, this will be slow to catch on. I'd like to be an early adopter but I'm not smart enough, heh...

Our natural communication tools should be our interface to our machines...

Re:Nintendo Power Glove, anyone?

[Steev]

I had one of those stupid gloves. I remember *begging* my parents to buy one for me. It ended up in the closet after about two weeks. it took an amazing amount of stamina to hold your arm pointed straight at the screen for the entire length of a game, and most of the glove-motion commands worked so badly you ended up using the built-in controller anyway!

Virtual keyboards

[nemesisj]

I think that this might be useful in situations where a keyboard is needed sometimes but is inconvenient in other situations. If anyone here saw the Final Fantasy movie, you'll know what I mean - one of the characters prompted a holographic keypad/interface to come up which she typed on, and then caused it to dissapear when the bad guys came and action was needed.