Gloves are great for keeping your hands warm. They are also great for keeping your fingerprints off of things, were you to become a famous jewel thief or something. You know what gloves aren’t good at, however? Using the magic of technology to turn into tactile homing beacons so you can find anything and everything you seem to have misplaced in your old age. Don’t worry. Getting old happens to the best of us and it sucks.
These new fancy uber-gloves do just that. Designers from the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology Aalto University, the University of Helsinki, and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics have created a pair of vibrating gloves that work to help find the stuff you have lost. It works in conjunction with Microsoft’s Kinect gesture system, turning into a sort of high-tech version of hot and cold.
The gloves have small vibrators on the back that work in conjunction with the Kinect. The designers are currently putting it through its paces and testing it out on people using the bona fide scientific method. So far, the results are extremely promising. According to the researchers, your hand is quite literally ‘pulled’ toward the object in question like a rat to, um, leftover spaghetti(Bet you thought we were gonna say cheese.)
This is, of course, just a concept design for now. Don’t go losing your keys and then booting up your Xbox 360 and thinking it will magically find them. No, for now you’ll have to use the Kinect to play at Star Wars and pretend you are on a riverboat or something.
