10 DIY Gloves for a lot more than just wearing
If you're into DIY stuff, this is a good alternative for you. We’ve worn gloves to keep the hands warm, and sure we can buy a variety of user-friendly gloves available these days – some with computing prowess and other for working with capacitive touchscreens. But because the busy world has lads that don’t fancy the usual shelf stuff, they get down to do it ‘their way’, and that’s when tinkering with gloves gives birth to DIY gloves with varying utilities. For the uninformed and the DIY appreciators alike we have listed 10 best homemade gloves that do everything from playing a piano to help you communicate with computers. Just scroll down for the treat.
1. Scott Garner’s Piano Gloves
Scott Garner’s gloves enables users to play a full size piano without any piano present. Dubbed the “Piano Gloves”, the design features two digitally enhanced gloves that use Arduino to processes and track the player’s movements, and create the corresponding piano notes. All that the user requires to do is wear the gloves and play the piano on any flat surface and the gloves will itself find out what the user intends to play.
2. Glove to sharpen FPS skills
A Make Forums user thetanktheory has turned a mouse into a glove for some First Person Shooting fun. Arranged together by ripping of a laser mouse and some random mouse parts found around the house, the Glove Mouse makes ‘those quick, twitch-reactions in FPS’ much easier.’ The project seems complete, but there’s a lot more tampering required here, at least that’s what thetanktheory believes.
3. HandTalk communication glove
Taking motion sensing to all new heights, we now have a glove that can help deaf people communicate. The HandTalk has to be worn by the deaf person on his/her palm. The different palm positions viz. a fist, extended fingers, etc will be sensed by the glove through flexor pads which sense different resistances depending on the curl angle of the fingers. The glove will then synchronize with the cellphone to display the different gestures into text messages, ultimately getting it converted into speech via an off-the-shelf translation program.
4. Clove 2 for wireless typing
This amazing new computer peripheral called Clove AKA The Cemetech Bluetooth Dataglove 2 is promising to revolutionize your life, especially if you’re fond of finishing your office work in places where it would be impossible to use a regular keyboard. The glove basically is meant to enable one-handed typing via a 31-combination finger chording design with three modes that allow every key on a standard keyboard to be typed with minimal effort. Thanks to Bluetooth, you don’t actually need to attach it to a comp or even be near one and since it profiles as a standard HID Keyboard, a simple translation layer to perform key remapping, sticky modifiers, and mode switching is the only software required.
Developed by Laetitia Sonami, this rather unique sensory enhanced glove was made way back in the year 1991 for a performance at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. Perhaps the first glove with integrated sensors, the Lady’s glove elevates the essence of any instrument. Bearing five Hall effect transducers on the finger tips, the gloves have a magnet on the right hand – which when touched by the finger tips generate signals converted into MIDI signals through synthesizers and samplers. In addition the Lady’s glove features microswitches on the finger ends for tactile control, bend sensors to measure finger inclination and sonar ranging to emitters on the shoe and the opposite arm. The Lady’s glove is a great embodiment of multiple and parallel controls, via gestures and touch.
6. Concert Hands – piano playing gloves
It was only time before computers and interactive gloves combined to make us pro musicians. Yes, with these freakish Concert Hands plugged in to the PC, you can become a pianist, or at least learn a song or two for that matter – that too without going looking for piano classes and then ending up learning nothing but a nursery jingle. A loathsome combination of software and hardware, this device lets the fingers of your hands, laid on the piano keys, receive haptic signals from the system. Moving your wrist placed on the computer controlled slide-bar towards the note and guiding the fingers to the key.
7. Atlas Glove
Not just any ordinary pair of gloves, the Atlas Gloves by Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv at the ITP New York University, is a DIY physical interface developed to control 3D map applications. The illuminating pair of gloves is a user interface which detects intuitive hand gestures like grabbing, pulling, reaching and rotating. Besides being used for controlling 3D map apps like Google Earth, the Gloves’ software is hackable and can be modified to act as a input device, a mouse if u may. Hooking a web cam to a computer is good enough to help identify the gloves’ LED-enabled gesture, which help in controlling wide range of computer applications and maps of course.
8. Distance measuring Southpaw glove
Known as the Southpaw this DIY glove is embedded with sonar range finder and a small LCD screen. This in no fancy glove for any kind of bull shit, this glove is serious stuff that can make you a talk of the town. The glove can tell you the distance to an object merely by pointing the hand towards it. This is possible courtesy a LilyPad Arduino fitted inside, which converts sonar range finder into length waves which are then displayed as distance on the LCD.
9. Glove phone
The cool DIY glove phone combines a Samsung A300 with a leather glove. The hack allows the combo to work as a phone which requires you dial by tapping buttons on the fingers, and use by holding your little finger to your mouth and your thumb to your ear. Besides making calls the glove phone can also let you send text messages with one hand. The wires sticking out all around the hand may be a put down with the glove, but 2nd version will have less wire explosion on the top.
The Thumbcode glove is described as the device independent digital sign language. The device independence signifies that the glove is designed to work with host of devices. It is a one-hand device-independent chording notation usable equally well with the left or right hand. Although usable for communication between humans, Thumbcode is primarily intended for human-computer interaction (HCI) with wearable computers.
