Augmented Reality: Combining Gloves and Glasses

A week ago I wrote a blog entitled "Glove Controllers and NUI" where I took a first (for me anyway) look at the use of data gloves. I concluded that if data gloves were in the future of NUI its days were already numbered because of developments like Project Natal. Project Natal can track your movements using a video camera rather than having to don a glove.

I kept thinking about that and realized that while Natal works great in a controlled environment such as your living room or in front of a public kiosk, it does not work everywhere. You have to have a video system watching your body movements and mapping that to some type of controls. What do you do when you are just walking aimlessly around - like when you are a tourist? For that you need a device you can carry with you.

There has been some concept illustrations created for augmented reality and even a couple of pretty cool re-world applications based on hand held devices. I can see this working really well and I have more to say about that in another post. The question is, can you use these devices to interact with the information around you or simply observe it?

If you combine the concepts of augmented reality glasses with controller gloves you can not only see information, you can manipulate it too.

Imagine you are looking at a street in Paris with your augmented reality glasses. You might see streets labeled and an arrow pointing to the Louvre. Using your data glove you could drill down on information you see through your glasses and choose other visual options.

While walking around wearing a pair of AR Glasses and waving your gloved hand in the air would look pretty odd today, it could become commonplace. After all, walking around talking to yourself was considered a sign of insanity until the invention of the bluetooth headset.

The applications that could be built around the AR Gloves and Glasses are pretty cool especially in industries such as surveying, utilities repair, laboratory, and other technician type jobs. Toss out the manuals and put on the glasses and glove and you have a computer-augmented-human doing work much faster and with more data at their fingertips - literally.

In an article from geeks.com.uk Nokia is filing a patent (see PDF) for exactly this combination: Glove controller and augmented reality glasses.



I would be very interested in hearing your opinion. Does the augmented reality glasses and controller glove have a future?