The
Power Glove was a neat little
device that the toy company
Mattel - the people who make
Barbie - introduced in
1989 for use with the
Nintendo Entertainment System (
NES). It was a
hand-tracking device that could be used in place of the standard
controllers while playing the
Nintendo games. By putting a special
sensor array on the tv, the
motion of the
glove was
tracked in
three-space. The
glove could also
detect finger motion and had a full set of
buttons on the
wrist. The
idea was to get people to
think they were
playing with
virtual reality when they were playing their
games, but the
real reality was that the
Power Glove just didn't work well with the
games.
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In order for the glove to register with the ultrasonic sensors, you had to keep your knuckles pointing at them at all times. If you've ever tried to hold your hand and arm up for any extended period of time, you know that it's difficult to do even for five minutes, let alone the time most people spend playing a game.
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Related to the above problem, the Power Glove only registers roll - in aviation, when one wing rises higher than another. If you do a pitch or yaw - in aviation, pitch is when the nose is higher or lower than the tail, yaw is when the nose goes left or right while the tail moves in the opposite direction - with your hand, the sensors cannot track the glove any longer.
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It is difficult to get the intended results with the sensors on the thumb and first three fingers in the glove. The glove can sense how much each finger is bent, and has two bits of info for each finger. That means there are 4 distinct states for each finger depending on how bent the finger is. If you're really flexible, you might be able to control with accuracy and hold all 16 of these states at once, but most people have difficulty, say, holding the index and ring fingers straight out while bending the middle finger.
Although the Power Glove didn't turn out to be a
great toy for the
Nintendo gamers, it was a very good toy for a lot of
self-proclaimed geeks. Many experimenters have played around with lower-end VR systems using the Power Glove since it was
hundreds of
dollars less than other VR-type gloves at the time, as well as much more
rugged.