How cool would it be to snap with your finger to witch on or off your iPod or Computer or many other of the gadgets around you. Or play a cool game on your Wii with this glove! Al least this controller will not smash your TV.Researchers at Engineered Fibre Structures (EFS), a University of Manchester spin-out, are very close to give us just this, a soft-fabric electronic glove that remotely controls equipment via a Bluetooth connection.
The glove is produced from standard acrylic or stretch-nylon base yarn and it can be made on a conventional industrial knitting machine. The wearable device looks and feels like a normal glove, except it has conductive pathways knitted into the material. The fingers are tipped with contactors, so if you put your thumb together with any other finger, you create a electric circuit and pang, you can activate anything that is designed to receive those signals.
Navigate your way with your fingertips trough documents in a office application or add a new interaction experience to your online world.
The glove was recently patented by EFS, and the company’s engineers believe its current configuration is best designed for gaming. Billy Hunter, the lead commercial director for the product, said this sort of application would be a commercial success judging by current trends. ‘You’ve got all these sort of things out now like Nintendo Wii,’ he said.
The Control Glove can be used in patient rehabilitation in healthcare, as a controller in video games, as a computer interface, and as a communications device, for industrial, security and military applications.
According to the engineers involved in this project, they are content with the current configuration of the glove, but for certain applications they might need to do some redesigning.
‘The textile part of the glove is more or less done,’ said Hunter. ‘If necessary, we can change the configuration fairly easily. What we need to do now is to miniaturise the electronics in the Bluetooth.’
Now let’s hope that we will see very soon the Fingertip control glove inaction with our Wii.
