[Steve Hoefer] pulled together a great hack for the friendless. This glove will play a heated game of rock-paper-scissors against you. [Steve] realized that the middle and fourth fingers are all that need to be monitored to decide which of the three signs you are making. He used flex sensors on the back of these fingers as an input. There is also an accelerometer to judge the three shakes that lead up to the shoot.
The small screen you see displays what the glove chose and is a hack in itself. This idea adapts from an Evil Mad Scientist project, using three sheets of acrylic etched with the different icons and edge-lit with LEDs. All of this, along with a speaker and scoreboard, connect to an Arduino. The icing on the cake? [Steve] coded an adaptive learning algorithm that observes your playing style to gain an advantage.
See this in action after the break. Once you’ve mastered rock-paper-scissors you should consider building other glove-based peripherals.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwvRWdWMy_E]
[Thanks Zokier]
alsome project i particularly like how it learns as u play
That would make sense, except there isn’t any tactic or play-style involved in Rock, Paper, Scissors.
@Johannes
Quite the contrary, knowing what opening move an opponent favours, or how they respond to certain moves, nets you a large advantage.
This would make an awesome kids toy product..especially if you could make it work over the Internet.
There are also other tricks such as “starting with the stone” from the japanese tradition. Not to mention observation skills and reflexes to change your mind mid throw.
@Johannes
Pineapple and Tom are completely right. Humans are notoriously bad at doing things ‘randomly’. Rather, there’s a complex thought process involving some game theory (trying to work out what the other player thinks you might do next, and what they might do next given what they did previously, etc).
Usually, rock-paper-scissors against a machine would be totally pointless for that very reason – the strategy’s all gone. But this makes it all more fun (if you have no friends, of course, as noted in the article)…
Want to buy “Lizard” and “Spock”
Like so many times before metku came up with something that others get the credit for. In this case I’m thinking about the multilayer etching:
http://metku.net/index.html?path=mods/multilayer-animation/index_eng
@rob
On the contrary, metku just demonstrates a particularly nice implementation of edgelit displays. The tech is fairly old though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightguide_display
@ben: Point taken, I’ll go hang my head in shame now.
Thank rob for remembering my article. I too discovered the concept way earlier than in that article. This is from 2001 when I invented the lighted mousepad. :) http://metku.net/index.html?path=mods/glowpad/index_eng After that the multicoloured engraving came in 2002: http://metku.net/index.html?path=mods/router/index_eng The animated version was just a natural progression after those…
So the acrylic display is cool, but keep in mind that it’s a very small part of this hack. He could have just as well used any other display (he’s using an arduino after all), or even 3 leds next to icon stickers of what each represent.
The MEAT of this hack is that it’s a glove that you play rock, paper, scissors with.
Why not playing rock paper scissors lizard spock ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iapcKVn7DdY