Glove Controllers and NUI

At E3 2009 a company called Iron Will Technologies announced a video game glove controller that will be released in Q4 of 2009. The Peregrine glove controller enables users to interact with 3D games via 30 predefined gestures. Basically, there are pressure sensors along each of the fingers and when you make contact with a sensor and your thumb its like pushing a button on a normal game controller.

You might remember how glove controllers were used in Minority Report - it was an application that still leaves me scratching my head - but seems to get people excited. What I'm wondering is: Do glove controllers have a future in NUI (outside of gaming, movies, and niche markets)?

A little bit of research turned up a previous attempt to introduce glove controllers for gaming back in 1989. The Power Glove produced by Mattel for Nintendo's game system apparently didn't work very well and was a complete flop.

Today a company called INITION produces and sells Glove Controllers with development kits - prices range from $1,495.00 to $7,175.00 - prices that are out of range for most causal gamers. You can still find the much less expensive, but no longer produced, product by INITION called Essential Reality P5 Data Glove on eBay for around $20.00 - $100.00. It's been discontinued - another failed mass market glove controller.

The glove controller by Iron Will Technologies has not had its price officially announced yet, but I read somewhere that it will probably fall into the $129.00 range. That will make more affordable but won't assure its success. Another option for NUI developers, which was just announced, is the AcceleGlove which is about $500.00 with the Java SDK. There is also ShapeHand by Mesureand Inc. - they don't list prices which always makes me think the product is going to be really expensive. I'm sure there are many other options if you are really interested.

The thing that strikes me, and maybe I'm just missing something, is how unlikely these data gloves or wired-gloves or glove-controllers (take your pick) are to be used by the general public for anything other than a few video games. Today these gloves are primary used for 3D rendering, controlling robotic hands, or learning sign language. Not exactly mainstream applications.

That's not to say that hand gestures, even very subtle ones like waving a finger back and forth, don't have a place in the future of NUI. They do! But, I think that future will be realized through some other mechanism than donning wired gloves. The kind of gesture tracking seen with Project Natal will probably evolve to track the fine-grained moments of fingers, but until that time perhaps glove controllers will have a place in the NUI landscape.