What Is Your Glove Language?
The Data Glove uses simple components like magnets and Hall effect sensors to add gesture control to a wide range of Bluetooth devices.
An entire generation has dreamed of having a glove that could control the world around them from the moment they saw Lucas Barton don a Power Glove and shock the world by deftly playing Rad Racer with it in the movie The Wizard. What they didn’t know initially was that they should take Lucas literally when he said, “I love the Power Glove. It's so bad.” It was very, very bad, indeed.
But here we are 35 years later, and technology has improved by leaps and bounds since the days of the Power Glove. So much so that Konrad Wohlfahrt decided to give it another go, but this time the glove was designed to control more than just video games. Using Wohlfahrt’s Data Glove, the wearer can control any Bluetooth device with hand gestures.
The Data Glove is built around a tiny Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 development board. Equipped with a powerful nRF52840 microcontroller, this board can communicate with other devices via Bluetooth, making interactions with other devices simple. This board, and a set of five Hall effect sensors and 20 neodymium magnets, were attached to a bicycle glove. The fixed magnets are positioned along each finger. As the fingers move, the magnetic fields they produce are altered. By measuring these fields with the sensors, the position of each finger can be determined.
The current version of Data Glove determines only if each finger is extended or contracted. By defining finger patterns of interest, the software can determine if an action should be triggered. These actions are carried out by sending a Bluetooth message to an external device, so exactly what the glove can do is determined by the capabilities and external APIs of these devices. Wohlfahrt demonstrated how the glove could be used to control media playback, presentations, or cameras, for instance.
The Data Glove also has an accelerometer, vibration motor, IR sensor, a light dependent resistor, an LED, and some buttons, so it can do more than just gesture detection. If you want a glove-based platform for electronics experimentation, this looks like a pretty good option, no matter what you are dreaming of making.
Step-by-step instructions are available for the build, and the components used are all readily available and inexpensive. You can even snag the software and 3D models for the case from GitHub to give you a head start in building your own. If you have some cool ideas for the Data Glove, be sure to share them with us! Or if glasses are more your idea of a good time, check out ShAIdes 2.0.