Following today’s earlier post on data gloves, HandUSB is a glove interface designed to relay fingertip touch data to a computer via USB. Although the gloves themselves are not extremely interesting or useful for your average hacker, the project has some good documentation. The electronics are all open source and he has links to the EAGLE files and the AVR Libc code. You can also find a demo program written for DOS. This project uses AVR-USB by Objective Development so if you are looking to move on from your USB-serial chips, this project would be a good resource to study.
[via YourlTronics]
Its cool looking and all, but what is it used for? I know the other one was used as a keyboard, but can you do the same w/ this one? I still want one.
As far as I know, this kind of kit is predominately for wearable computing. The ones I’ve seen generally signal “finger A is touching finger B”, but I haven’t seen a *real* interface that does a good job intuitively mapping finger combinations. The most common gestures tend to be touching the thumb to one of the fingers on the same hand, but that only gets you 8 combinations (unless you killed Inigo Montoya’s father) which is a far cry from e.g. a keyboard. As with most advances in HMI, the problem is not in getting the technology to work, but in getting people to work with it intuitively.