Here’s a project from Electrical and Computer Engineering students from Cornell tackling the classic glove-mouse project. Not particularly streetwear ready at this point, but what they explored as far as integration into natural hand movements should prove useful reading for wearables designers.
For our ECE 4760 final project, we designed and built a wireless computer pointing device with accelerometer based movement control. Our implementation allows the user to wear a set of hardware (a glove and connected armband) and control a cursor through different hand orientations and finger presses. Users can operate their computers with their hands in midair without the hassle of desks surfaces or wires.
This system connects to an computer using standard USB and supports Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.
Rationale and Inspiration
While brainstorming an idea for our final project, we decided to base our project idea around what we enjoy most about Electrical and Computer Engineering: computers. We felt that it would be interesting to somehow design a microcontroller based project which could somehow interface or communicate with our own personal computers.
Additionally, we were originally inspired by a specific last project from the previous semester: a sign language translating sensor glove. This device was able to sense hand gestures and map them from a sign language alphabet to a standard English alphabet. With the thoughts of computer interfacing and hand motion in mind, we came up with this project idea.
The motivation for this project was to create an intuitive glove-based pointing device for multiple applications. The hope was to be able to create not just a working project but a fully-developed device in terms of intuitive functionality and practical, usable features.
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