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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.
It would be funny to flip off the computer, heh.
where the point was made that you might not want your pc to know where you hands are at all time... Dave, about last night...
Shift happens. Fire it up.
Am I the only one who remembers where this will go? Check Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and remember -- in the future, you'll have to sit reeeeeaaaaally still to keep your PC from reformatting itself.
They that would sacrifice their
f/p?
Anyone remember Nintendo's glove-thingy? That was *awesome* for Punch-out!
"Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
now when mom walks by her 14-year old boy's room, all she has to say is, "why is the cursor going up and down so fast?" and >boom no more internet porn.
go get it
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.
With a couple of nukes and all the tea in China, we could make this world a British paradise.
fdisk deleted my ext2 partition! crap!
Great! Now when playing WolfTest I can actually grab the teamkillers and slap them silly! Woo hoo!
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?
Sham on
But couldn't they have just hacked a Mattel Power Glove?
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Of course, the gesture command for dismissing annoying pop-up ads should be obvious, depending upon whether you are using LOCALE=en_US or LOCALE=en_UK.
www.eFax.com are spammers
If this catches on, we'll be typing with sign language.
Ever see the movie Johnny Mnemonic? Keanu Reeves's character used a pair of "data gloves" that looked and worked much like these. I wonder if they got the idea from the movie?
Anyway, I guess their next project should be an implantable chip that lets you store 80GB of data in your brain. Damn, that actually seemed like a lot of data back then..
This is potentially a revolution in ergonomics especially for Windows admins. Just imagine how much less carpal tunnel syndromes when the three finger salute is replaced with just one finger.
But, they would have to be cheap anyway, since fingers nails grow and move and chips which didn't get damaged would fall off.
Of course a whole cyberborg army is no match for a couple of really powerful magnets....
I'm not getting the chip.....
M0571y H@rml355.
What you need is a way to program the glove to recognize certain rythmic motions and to interpret that as writing code. Back and forth, side to side, whatever, it would have to conform to certain preferences of the user. These motions are then interpreted and translated into functions and subroutines for whatever application you are writing.
"Few, I am exhausted. I just pulled off 10 lines of code!"
"I just do not have any more code in me for today..."
Now you can get back to your own sick mind.
Troll Like a Champion Today
Well done to them but unless they provide armrests my arms will get tired real quick. Think of the bodyguards in Payback if you don't see my point.
It would look very cool to use them, but only if there was some 3D holographic display.......and it was....er....tactile...or something.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
Gives new meaning to the "three fingered salute!"
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
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???
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Development info and software available
Adapted uses of the Power Glove to VR world navigation
History of the Power Glove
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Yeah, I remember this. It always made playing super mario difficult....
Interesting stuff. Power supply, optical and processing capabilities, sensory systems, all in a 1.2mm package.
Massively manufactured, at large scales could make for some very interesting deployment opportunities...
Of course, the nefarious applications for this sort of thing are pretty obvious.
And yet, that still shouldn't be a reason not to develop this technology.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
if ((finger2 == up) && (other_fingers == down)) { /* }
reboot -t now }
else if ((finger2 == up) && (finger1 == up) && (other_fingers == down)) {
rm -rf
Attacking human-comp interfacing on all fronts is surely good, but optical and voice control are higher on the evolutionary scale than ever-more sophisticated manual data entry devices. Pyramidal keyboards, data gloves, et al are all variations on an inferior theme. Keyboards, mice, trackballs, joystics, are incredibly inefficient compared to how fast our minds and our computers can process data. That's the real bottleneck right now, not the bus or platter rotation. This glove is just a new and improved way to get carpal tunnel.
There are already experiements with direct patching into the brain, and just think of the virus possibilities of running Outlook on that platform.
It was called a Nintendo Power-Glove.
I've also seen schematics & drivers so that you can connect your power glove to a serial port & use it as a mouse replacement.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
The blue screen of death,
My middle finger extends:
Control-Alt-Delete
Great....now porn will be even more interactive! I don't even want to know what implications this will have more Freddie Got Fingered 2.
Maskirovka
This is going to revolutionize XXX games. Talk about a whole new level of 'interactivity'
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!
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
When it comes to video games, the wave of the future is force feedback, because when we get input from the input devices it makes them more intuitive to use.
When we're actually trying to get something done with computers, we wave our hands in the air because it removes contact from devices, gets rid of all force feedback, and. . . well. . . er. .
Nintendo Power Glove.
Used more for VR and hacking than any other interface in the early 90's. I was able to map commands to gestures in DOS, and to some limit in linux around 1996.
The fact that it isn't bulky or cyber-looking like the powerglove was and hopefully it doesn't have that nasty Ultrasonic rangefinding.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I like the one that looks out the back window.
Oh, the software! I thought XP could read my mind and phone home about it.
Really though, do you think the company that has yet to embrace multiple virtual screens and mice with three buttons properly, will ever use this? Sure, the prototype uses Win95 (at least they knew better than to use MS for web stuff. quoth the page, "meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.75 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.7 sun4u) [Netscape]"") Will MS really pick it up and make it available with their GUI? I think not. Xfree86 will beat them to real and invovative uses for the interface by years!
Kudos to Hollar et al. This is a cool glove. MJ wants to know if you have one with rhine stones.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Just use the body heat powered thermoelectric system from a few articles back for power and you have an always-on, ubiquitous interface solution. Just think of the possibilities that this could have in public.
Think about it. You have these sensors in each of your fingertips and any flat surface becomes an instant full-size keyboard.
It also one-ups the mouse-keyboard combination, no more mouse/touchpad. Just lift your forefinger off the virtual keyboard and move the mouse pointer by pointing at the screen. Your fingers never have to leave the home-row.
For those that can't touch-type, unroll a cheat-sheet and type on it.
This will be a GREAT technology once it matures.
"Good Amy, reboot the computer...you get a bannana if the service pack fixed the problem...good Amy, good monkey!"
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
Or maybe it was because the powerglove was pretty much a piece of crap, and rarely worked with the hardware it was intended for (NES). Let alone a real PC with some trickery in between.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
I did the same thing at UIUC back in '97...
I used dual 3-axis accelerometers for the hand motion, and discrete switches to determine
finger joint position. The wires were sewn into the glove directly.
The result was very accurate hand movement, with the trade off of less complex finger movements.
Needless to say, I like the idea. It is a _very_ natural interface for a lot of applications. The glove is a little unwieldy, but for some reason beyond comprehension, everyone who does this seems to build theirs around the heaviest winter glove they can find... What someone needs to do is to build this using discreet sealed components, on the outside of thin, air-holed neoprene (similar to a bicyclist's glove.)
Also, the software is the key to whether this really works out. You need a virtual keyboard app (similar to what pen laptops use), plus a gesture pad (a la grafitti or CAD gestures), plus a standard mouse driver. (I never got around to polshing my software beyond anywhere other than manipulating a Rubik's-style 3D Cube. No, you couldn't acutally solve it.)
I'd use it more like a macro keyboard, really.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
The strange thing is that in keyboards and WIMP user interfaces, we seem to have reached a point where it is far from obvious where we can progress next. There hasn't been significant progress in user interfaces since the 1970s when Xerox Parc developed the mouse based interfaces which we all use today - oh sure, we have colour, and that paper clip, and skinability, but none of these are anything other than incremental enhancements.
Many people are betting on 3D user interfaces, but I remain unconvinced that these will actually be useful, or that a 2D representation of objects in 3D would be better than the 2D representation of objects in 2D which we have now.
Most new input devices are also variations on the mouse theme, be they light-pens (hardly new, I remember them in the mid-80s), touch screens, or these gloves.
So the question is, have we reached a global optimum in user interface design, or is there some other approach that I haven't even considered that we will all be using in 30 years?
What's more, they combine this idea with haptics, attaching motors so that when you interact with objects, they push back on you. You can even rest your hand on an object and have the motors support the weight of your arm. Very Cool.
http://www.immersion.com/products/3d/intera ction/o verview.shtml
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
I see on the site the proposed fingernal size design has a very small RF Communication with Anntena chip. Do such things exist today? I'm working on something similar to this - ADXL 202 talking to a microprocessor, then to a central computer. RF communication is the next step, and Id like to use that rather than say...Bluetooth or XISPIKE to do the wireless communications. Anyone know?
,
faeryman
if (hand.middlefinger == TRUE) {
close(freakinAnnoyingBannerAd);
}
I can't wait.
If:
The crotch-scratching motion is detected on a regular basis, you might get more pop-up ads for Gold Bond Medicated Powder.
Likewise, another common motion among those who sit all day might put some Preparation H commercials in your future.
Your typical 13-year-old might get more porn adverts, 'tis true...
The common nose-picking gestures might queue some Kleenex adverts up for your viewing.
Yes indeed, we should all sign up for this technology as there is no doubt that it will improve our lives beyond measure.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I know the first gesture I would like to make to my microsoft box:)
From todays earlier piece on Thermoelectrics.. So eventually you have the fake fingernails that never need replacing and can control your T.V.. I just know what gesture I'd program for Jerry Springer.
Forget smart dust, I want smart liquid!
I want to be able to DRINK an upgrade and have it interface with me directly. A pint of CPUs on the house! That way I can drink and actually get SMARTER instead of the current opposite result.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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...
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Yes, I know it wasn't the best movie ever made, but it had the goofiest dataglove gestures I've even seen or imagined. Gave new meaning to pointlessness. (Much like this post).
I'm the stranger...posting to
I had one of these in the late 80's.
It was called the Nintento Power Glove.
It let me beat up Glass Joe, the Hippo, and Mike Tyson.
And it was grand.
do not read this line twice.
no offense to these academic weeners but nintendo released one of those things in the 80s. Using hand gestures really isn't as great as it sounds. I'd rather using fingure gestures (typing) than go swinging my hand around and practically learning sign langauge, when i could just type it up in 2 seconds.
"You should all be glad that you are alive and well and able to masturbate as frequently as you like while looking at goatse.cx, and not stuck under 100 stories of a collapsed building with your penis sliced off from shrapnel."
Apparently, we are.
The 9/11 tragedy was terrible. Last I saw on CNN, over 300 people have been confirmed dead, and over five thousand are missing. But, how many people do you hear going around saying the same basic thing you said, but about Pearl Harbor? The atomic bomb? World War I, the "war to end all wars"? The Civil War? The American Revolution? Or even OKC? Until now. I haven't heard many people on the street cursing others for going on with their daily lives when only a few years ago several people died in the OKC bombing. Why? Because we moved on.
And even now, we (and by "we", I mean Joe Average, like me) need to move on. Our best hope to defeat the intent of these terrorists is to go on with our daily lives. I'm not saying we should forget the people who died for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or their families and friends, or the totally awesome police, firemen, and volunteers who are still out there, weeks after it all happened, searching for survivors and digging through the wreckage. Slashdot is a technology news site and *nix advocacy site, not a typical news site/organization like CNN, AP, Reuters, etc. Therefore, it should not be expected to just drop everything and keep updating the site with news about the rescue efforts.
On that note, what do YOU think Slashdot should be doing? I notice nowhere above where you posted what you think Slashdot should do to correct itself. Your post came off sounding more like a flame against "computer-playing-linux-geeks".
I know nothing about you. Maybe someone you know and love is still missing. Maybe you just live in NY. Maybe you have loved ones in the Armed Forces who may be in danger in the future should this whoel situation escalate. Maybe you are just a concerned American who is only affected by the attacks patrioticly and symbolicly, like me. (excuse my spelling if it's incorrect, please)
This whole damn situation should not be forgotten. But we have to move on eventually.
Whatever you could do with this for computer input, I think it would also be very nice if you could use this for everything else. To give a simple example, turning the lights, the tv, whatever,... in your house on and off. More complicated example: lock/unlock your car. Off course, the last one (and possibly the in-house ones too, why not?) would require encryption.
/me thinks we're taking a big step in the right direction here :-)
All this would be very neat though... remember that all tech that doesn't look like it's magic, is not advanced enough...
uXs
What our ancestors would really think, if they were alive today, is: Why is it so dark in here? (Terry Pratchett)
... here at PSU they've been working on something similar. It is essentially a prototype for a map that visitors can ask questions to and gesture.
2 0R eleases/August/sharma.html
http://www.engr.psu.edu/news/News/1999%20Press%
Joyd does essentially the same thing... why have a sensor when you can just move a stick?
Prove to your local NT guy that Joysticks aren't just for Quake! http://freshmeat.net/projects/joyd/
You can map a very large amount of commands to different joystick functions, from pushing one button, or moving 1 direction - to moving to corner, and pushing several buttons at once. You can also execute more than one command with just one function.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Maybe George Lucas can stop making dumb Star Wars' and return to being cool and do another Wizard.
As I recall, in the first Wizard there is a data glove that controlls the NES, where you move your hand around and then your character dies. Sadly in the Wizard the forces of good did not hold this all mighty power glove, and nothing will change in the sequel.
In the Wizard 2, which I am now copyrighting as my own, the new data glove will fall into the evil hands of mr Bin Laden, who will suddenly control all the combine wheat harvesters at the whim of his hand.
In a mastery of diplomatic relations, spear headed by Jessie Jackson, a croquet match is secured between bin Laden and OJ Simpson. "The Murderers Duel" as it's called, plays for the mighty power glove and indirectly the awesome power of the worlds wheat harvesters. With bin Laden in the lead, OJ becomes desperate and quits the game to head for the airport. He soon finds out that bin Laden is dead by a mystery assasin and hops in a white Ford Bronco and drives around with a gun to his head.
In the end Simpson is aquited, but with everyone knowing what really happened he celebrated as a hero, and eventually gets a TV show on UPN.
The first time you sneeze or cough or answer the phone you could end up with all sorts of gibberish, or maybe even rebooting your computer.
It seems to me that you need some sort of disconnect override. Maybe some sort of camera that can tell when you're looking at the screen. (I seem to recall hearing something about that on here in the past...)
Let's say I'm playing CS. Not only would this help me position keys anywhere I wanted but instead of a mouse just point at the guy you want to shoot.
I've seen, somewhere, a keyboard made for gaming (central arrowkeys with conveniently placed programmable buttons around it) but this would be that all hollow. Just think about it for a second... any key, any where you wanted it! Programmable, personalized, keyboards!
(Damn, now I want one of these things sometime tomorrow).
No sig for you.
Any other Mac users out there remembers MacPlaymate?
Yet, I still think of Ender's Game and Infocom's A Mind Forever Voyaging and their ideas of immmersive technology. Leaps in AI (well, game AIs would create a reasonable personality to interact with), voice recognition, these controls and even the thermoelectrics in the earlier story means that we're stepping into territory where we have to take care.
Still, imagine your PDA in 15 years...
Someone completely disproves this argument at tacoinspector.com.
My god, can you imagine the implications for the p0rn industry?
The battle of the sexes will never be won . . . there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.
--Randal
I can see devices like this used to control complicated Battlebots, combined with a headmounted display and voice commands. Forget a bunch of joysticks, buttons, and switches, just assign different functions to different hand movements. Or just put some robotic hands on it and literally grab and toss your opponent... There must be some weapons configurations that haven't been practical due to control system limitations. Now if I could just figure out a way to get them to let me start a project on this at work...
So with the combination of this and wireless control, we're going to start seeing people waving their hands around, controlling remote devices - really, it's going to look like (and I cringe when I say this) .. magic.
Just imagine this glove with force feedback. I'm not sure how it could be done, but that'd be freakin cool. An actual tactile ability to feel virtual objects.
Of course, the first industry to adopt this will be pornogrophy. Imagine the new possibilities for cybersex!
to accept the praise of personal wisdom is an affront to the very ideal i hold dear.
...as if there were not enough discrimination against older programmers already.
What does this thing have that the Nintendo Power Glove doesn't?
Just assign different "hand positions" to all the meta-keys the editor uses. i.e.:
palms-down = normal
palms-45-degrees = ctrl
palms-sideways = alt
palms-up (yikes) = meta (or whatever)
etc.
and "type" normally.
And for vi, just turn your wrists sideways a bit to enter "edit mode."
Never mind, this is a stupid idea.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
"I love the Power Glove."
Now, if only I can keep my kid brother from trying to get to a huge dinosaur statue in California...
FreeBSD - the power to serve.
Although the technology is certainly impressive, I have to wonder if this really would produce a better input device than the manual devices we now have:
Can it be used to input text more rapidly than a keyboard?
I doubt it. The example which comes to mind is how Palm decided to deal with the difficulties in handwriting recognition; that is, by devising their own alphabet and forcing the users to learn it, rather than designing software which attempted to understand each individual's idiomatic writing style. The designers of this glove interface would face the same decision -- and it's important to remember that many attempts at user-adaptive recognition have failed. So, assuming that users would have to learn a gesture alphabet to use the glove, how fast could they "type?" Although I've practiced Graffiti diligently, I seem to top out around the 30 wpm which Palm claims is the maximum. On the other hand, I can easily type 90-100 wpm on a keyboard.
Can it be more intuitive and/or more precise than a mouse?
Again, I doubt it. The screen, the tabletop that the mouse moves on, and the desktop software (X, Windows, Mac, etc.) are all designed for 2-D interactions. What's the use of having an extra degree of freedom with the controller? I'm sure that it would be possible to develop a 3-D desktop environment, but what about all of the 2-D standard applications? I doubt that I could get the same precision drawing objects in PowerPoint, for instance, using my whole arm (or at least my forearm) for hours a day than I can with a mouse. Fatigue would eventually cause a lot of inaccuracy.
Speaking of fatigue...will this input device be more helpful for avoiding repetitive motion injuries?
I'm not an ergonomics expert, but it seems as if you would be prone to repetitive motions of a different kind. Yes, using keyboards and mice for hours a day is a bad thing in the long run. But is trading carpal tunnel syndrome for, say, tendinitis in the elbow any better of a situation?
I'm sure there would be SOME use for this kind of technology. But I don't see it as being a wholesale improvement over current input methods for the kinds of systems we have. Although I usually hate to use the word "paradigm" in polite company, I think it's fair to say that our whole notion of computing is built on a "flat paradigm", for better or worse. Ultimately, we will have to design different displays and ways of thinking in order to restructure our interactions with computers. It will take more than a glove.
(Whew...got through the whole post without making one Michael Jackson joke...)
"she says i'm lousy conversation. as if that's supposed to help."
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.
$45 per U Colocation Special
Now all we need is a new clause in the Mafiasoft Windoze license agreement in addition to some innovative technology. The clause would state that you shall not flip off Mafiasoft Windoze. The technology would be a double-barreled shotgun mounted to a robotic base on top of the computer monitor. This shotgun would be fired by a solenoid controlled by Mafiasoft Windoze. Every time Mafiasoft Windoze detects that it's being flipped off, it will simultaneously perform two innovative actions:
1. It will fire the shotgun at the user's head, roadrage-style.
2. It will reboot and display the following message:
Mafiasoft: Where do you want to pay today?
Sounds like what Jaron Lanier was doing 30 years ago. You can read all about it in Howards Rheingold's excellent book Virtual Reality circa 1991. (not to take away from their efforts.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Gives a new meaning to the phrase "chipping a nail" doesn't it.
Either the marketers are already active setting the paradigm of buying more as the nail grows and gets clipped off, rather than using a glove (or something similar, not bonded to a body part) or I am getting too cynical.
The 5DT Data Glove has had gesture recognition built into the driver for years (and has a mouse emulation layer built into the hardware), and other gloves have had gesture recognition software available for longer.
The only "new" thing I can see in this project is their (currently not realised) longer term "smart dust" remote sensor technology. Gesture recognition is old though.
Imagine one of these things with force feedback. Online Arm Wrestling. :)
On a more serious note: More accurate long distance surgery.
SIGFEH
There are more applications of Smartdust at http://basics.eecs.berkeley.edu/sensorwebs.
The most salient feature is that the small size and capability for independent operations allow Smartdust motes to be used just about anywhere, to enhance/complement existing tools.
L'etat n'a pas besoin des savants.
- Robespierre, refusing clemency for Lavoisier
This isn't exactly a nifty new idea. I made one of these in Junior High. +) way to go nintendo. The glove on top of the frensel optic displays made descent a gut wrenching game!
WURD!!
Now my computer will _KNOW_ when I'm flipping it off!!!
Hrm. I suppose that is all I'm really doing isn't it? Well, it felt good to say what I did anyway.
I think something like this would be really cool for browsing with something like Opera. Just wave your hand and go back.
How about Black and White anyone?
You might want to check out the SmartBoard by Data Desk. It's a nicely laid-out split keyboard with low-force mechanical keys. It's a little loud, but boy does it feel beautiful. The layout might look odd to begin with, but I found it very easy to adapt and I'm a fucking fast typist. Plus it's only $70, which in these days of cheap Microsoft Natural knock-offs and $300 UberErgo boards is a pretty good deal.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Over the last 10 years or so, I've seen tons of this lowend VR stuff try to pop-up and fizzle right away. The PowerGlove is about the only glove device - IIRC this is due to some patent that VPL has on "using a glove device for input".
And there have been tons of 3d glasses that have come and gone - I've even got a video card in my machine that has a special hookup for 3d glasses and of course you can't find any.
So, is there any chance of this stuff ever making it onto the shelves of Best Buy or CompUSA?
Now you can really 'use the force' in star wars games!
mmmmm Darth Vader's strangling gesture....
Lots of people posting comments about 'free-movement' gesture reading systems replacing keyboards, and being used as part of our day-to-day operation of computers. I beg to differ...
:)
I believe such a system to be unsuitable for non-specialised input.
By this, I mean I can't see keyboards being replaced with 'free-movement' gesture readers.
The reason for this is that, as human beings, we make a hell of a lot of unconscious gestures. It is very difficult to exert total self-control over your body - ask any cop who's been trained to spot lies. We tend to make the smallest gestures without thinking or realinsing it.
For example, when you are typing an email, you probably pause between words, thinking of how to phrase a sentence, or even checking spelling in your head. As you pause, your fingers may tap lightly on the keyboard. The actual movements between 'thinking' on a key, and depressing the key, vary only in force and depth. If you were 'air-typing', the difference in depth would be negligible, and it could be very difficult to spot the force difference.
The ability to obtain the high levels of self control required to avoid such a scenario would be, I fear, beyond the ability of most. It is true that surgeons, pilots, artists etc. all develop such a level of self-control or steady-handedness, but this is generally limited to the key moments when precision is called for.
Have a look at the scrawl on your next doctor's prescription if you doubt me.
One possibility would be to have a control gesture - one which toggles 'input mode' on and off. a control gesture would have to be complex, to avoid it's accidental execution. However, we would then have to train ourselves to wrap a and around all our subconscious movements. Which I think may require the skills of a few KGB hypnotists. Even in the best case, I think that most people would not put the effort in. Look at the decline of true touch-typists since the development of photocopiers and printers.
When speculating on future technology, *sometimes* it's interesting to see what the science-fiction authors think about it. Most don't seem to go beyond the concept of 'touch screen' consoles, coupled with voice recognition. Earth: Final conflict, is about the most intersting. First, they do have those trendy holo-consoles, but still the operators have to 'touch' particular areas to do particular things. Secondly, one of the characteristics developed to make the Taelons appear alien is the high levels of self-control they display. Yet even they, with their peculiar gestures don't appear to apply this to input devices. This of course, doesn't prove anything, but it is interesting that nobody seems to have considered it viable.
Anyway, I suspect that gesture based HCI systems are only really suited for specialist cases, generally when the gestures translate into another motion of some kind. Such systems will never be in general use as input devices.
But gimme a Battlemech to control...
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
let's see some force feedback on these puppies...
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Now I can finally play realistic Rock-Paper-Scissors against the computer.
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In this case, serial port, not parallel. Used in addition to the mouse (as opposed to a mouse replacement), by reverse engineering the bytes in the serial data stream and using the Director Serial Xtra.
This reminds me of a device for the Nintendo Entertainment System from like 10 or 15 years ago. It was a glove styled as a controller that didn't go over very well with the kids, so was discontinued. Later it was found that they were perfect for home-brew Virtual Reality systems. With a few bucks and some minor modifications, you'd connect it to the serial port on a PC and go to town. I had one that I modded, but I ended up destroying it when I moved a few years ago. It was pretty cool, glad to see the pro's doing it again.
Things you can say to your dog that you can't say to a girl: "How about a nice bone?"
Lanier was born in 1960. Inventing a data glove in 1971 when he was eleven, only shortly after the first mouse was built, would have been impressive indeed. ;)
On the other hand (sorry), you're right to point out his idea. Though his working prototype for the Data Glove (the first of its kind) worked sorta like GPS, with various transceivers placed around the room (IIRC), he knew that it would ultimately have to use accelerometers, and provide haptic feedback for best use. It's just that the proper MEMS wouldn't be around for a couple of decades.
Here's an interview with him about it.
This was done at least 15 years ago with the release of the seminal Spinal Tap album Smell the Glove.
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Some more information can be found at the FAQ.
And some images are located there:
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I'm curious, just how the hell did the old Nintendo Power Glove work?
I've seen one once, in a pawn shop. I didn't have the 4 bucks to buy it, nor the old NES to operate it with.
It appears to have to IREDs in the front, but these could very well simply be LEDs. Also, it has the (kickass) old square NES controller on top of it.
So, anybody want to tell me how the hell this stupid thing worked? To me, it looks like you have to like, use the controller with your left hand only.
My hypothesis, is that the little IRED/LEDs on the front, pick up the light emitted from the screen, much in the way that the old Zappers did, and moves your character sprite up/down/left/right as neccesary.
Another amusing point, remember that stupid flick The Wizard, in which said asinie peripheral was a plot contrivance? I was about thiiis |--|close to being cast as the little autistic kid in said shameless, hour and a half Nintendo commercial.
Much of the movie was shot in Garnderville and Mound House (NV), and the keen-eyed local will notice the casino floor and arcade at Sharkey's and the Pizza Barn and that one restarunt in Mound House that was recently a gay nightclub (called The Spectrum), and I think is now some "family dining" joint now (called something lame like Sugars or some crap, I dunno, shit, after I graduated from high school, I never gave Dayton and Moundhouse a second look). But then again, it was kinda cool going to middle and high school 2 miles from the world-famous Moonlight Bunny Ranch...
But I ramble on, I'm good at that.
Steve, out
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Now you can really tell Windows what you think ...
;o)
That would be like giving sight to the blind. I've yet to come up with wording to describe what I think when I use Windows. let alone a gesture that would do suffice.
Have a look at this, though: Intel Open CV library. The guy has a "no glove approach" to gesture recognition.
Especially, have a look at Gestscal.avi (AVI of detecting static hand position gestures using gradient histograms 5.1M) and of course the manual.
Hope you find some ideas in there (the lib is opensource).
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
There's a little company in Pretoria (in South Africa) called 5DT that has been producing data gloves that can be used as a mouse for quite a while now. Check out these links.
Their homepage.
Their hardware page (includes data gloves).
One of the data glove pages.
glued to each fingernail
Call me odd, but does anyone else have a problem gluing electronics to themselves? I may be old fassion, but it would make me feel just a little less human knowing they were on.
Granted pacemakers and such are the norm, but those and similar devices are intended to replace broken parts, not enhance the body.
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Now in order to reboot Windows, all you have to do is flash your computer the bird.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Did I have a powerglove with my Nintendo like 6 years ago? How is this new?
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For god's sake it is not a virtual keyboard! We need interfaces that go beyond point and click, aka, point and grunt.
Devices like this can bring us into the future where you can have many many gestures at your command, and have a rich language in your interface.
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Perfect for playing an air guitar. Or for other virtual instruments. I learned to play a clarinet in grade school, almost applied to a conservatory instead of going to college. It would be great to be able to put all those years of playing to use with the 'glove' to control a virtual instrument without having to learn how to play a keyboard.
As an input for 3D graphics there is great potential. It would need a 'foot switch' to do mode changes from manipulation to keyboard modes.
RB
Could this tech be used for medical uses? Such as the way they are using robots to perform surgery from a distance. Could this lead to better control? I know it doesnt have any tactile feedback but for certain things it could work.
Also, what about those who are crippled? If you have very limited movement of your arms/hands you could use these to move robotic arms or to control a computer. What about putting the sensors on their heads? I think the idea of using the glove mixed with a robotic arm would do wonders for those who can not even move enough to bring a drink to their own lips. Mix this with eye and head sensors and you really start things moving.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
We've been doing optical gesture recognition tech for several years now. Funded by various grants from various organizations, we have one product (Use Your Head) that uses a normal USB camera (only on Windows though, sorry) and turns a person head motions into keystrokes. The intent of that product is to turn the normal head-bobbing and weaving seen by people playing FPSs into actual movements. It uses < 5% CPU and is completely customizable including sensitivity.
If you want, check it out at:
Main Gestures Site
Use Your Head Site
Ron Hay
Turing Machinist
Cybernet Systems Corp.
It would be against the EULA to write the code to interpret that particular gesture.
As computers move into voice recognition, this is ideal for those deaf computers out there.
Tap your thumb with your fingers. Wear one smart dust (more like sand, really) on each nail. Your primary hand (right for most) taps out combinations for letters and numbers, your secondary hand (left) is for function/2nd keys (shift, mouse operation, ctrl, etc.) I think this would be much more usable/learnable than waving type gestures. Seems like the sharp deceleration of a tap would be more easily differentiated than pauses between gestures.
WTF is wrong with a keyboard, anyway?
(And yes! yes! yes! I *am* aware that some miniscule percentage of the population doesn't have hands...)
Let's face it: *something* is wrong with just about *everybody* -- get over it and get on with life.
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I can't find the obligatory Beowulf post :-) It's actually applicable here - one of the more interesting things to do with Smart Dust and similar locator technologies is for them to talk to each other about where they are and to detect changes in their relative positions. It's not just a server thing. Vernor Vinge's book "A Deepness In The Sky" has a lot of discussion about what you could do with locator smart-dust; it's obviously speculative fiction, but it does a great job of looking at the potential for technology.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Vernor Vinge's book "A Deepness In The Sky" has a lot of discussion about what you could do with locator smart-dust; it's obviously speculative fiction, but it does a great job of looking at the potential for technology. Think about the effects of small (fictionally nanotech, but really small is probably enough) devices that communicate with their neighbors, have some computing power, and can do relative location detection. What could you do with that?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They are doing 20yr old research and don't know when to use a gif/png instead of a jpg.
c /g estapp.jpg
http://bsac.eecs.berkeley.edu/~shollar/fingerac
What is this? Am I supposed to be able to see something here?
You're missing the kigo. It's a senryu, not a haiku.