No, I’m not talking about gestures involving the middle finger salute or bludgeoning your PC with a club. Try communicating with it using a ‘gesture glove.’

Movies and entertainment can often be sources of ideas and inspiration for engineers, often including objects or devices based on engineering principles or are actually engineered. While the flying car hasn’t yet happened (Thank God. Imagine the mayhem.), virtual reality is moving though mainly still in labs, and engineers are probably the most prevalent user of 3D, even if those objects are merely representations of the real thing.

Movies such as iRobot, War of the Worlds (The remake wasn’t bad, though I prefer the original.), and Minority Report are recent examples which present technologies as fantasy. According to this article, at least one of those fantasies—in this case is becoming reality: the gesture glove. While much earlier movies such as Brainstorm and Firefox bypassed instrumented body movement with thought-response systems, let’s take this one step at a time and stay with Tom “Jumped the Couch” Cruise finding and manipulating computer data with the wave of a hand, or two.

The film sees characters call up and manipulate video footage and other data in mid-air after donning a special pair of gloves. Now defense company Raytheon, based in Massachusetts, is working on a real version and has even employed John Underkoffler, the researcher who proposed the interface to the makers of the film.

The Raytheon effort is intended to help armed forces commanders visually display and manage data—from satellites, sensors, and soldiers—by ‘communicating’ with the related systems with instrumented gesture gloves. A researcher mentioned in the article, John Underkoffler, says “Keystrokes and mouse clicks limit your degree of freedom,” and that hands—with gesture-based technologies—can do as much as five or six mice. Currently, ‘scores of soldiers’ man banks of individual PCs. In Raytheon’s vision, data, real-time video, and maps will merge—and be referenced and manipulated much more quickly and easily with gesture gloves.

That article was from DefenseTech.org this past April. Underkoffler has reappeared in a recent article from CBS News. Getting back to Minority Report, he says of the gesture glove, “It was only masquerading as science fiction. Not, it’s science fact.” Retired Air Force Gen. Gerald F. Perryman, Jr., with Raytheon, says “Our customers are decision quality actionable information. (Can we put at least one hyphen in there?)

He also see gesture gloves moving into videogames, air traffic control, medical imagining, financial services—”…anywhere there’s an enormous amount of data. (I would also think adult entertainment as was eluded to in Brainstorm, but what the hell do I know…)

The CBS News piece mentions that the glove is ‘faster and more logical than a mouse and a keyboard.’

Maybe so. I remember the same claims, however, about various technologies, including voice recognition. That’s gotten cheaper and more accurate, but how many computers do you see that follow spoken commands?

What do you think? Would gesture gloves or any such ‘sensory interface’ help you as an engineer better interact with a combination of 3D images, the dimensional and other data behind them, parts and components libraries, supplier and logistics data, etc?

Other Resources:

Machine Gesture and Sign Language Recognition

Acceleration Sensing Glove

(PDF) Wireless Static Hand Gesture Recognition with Accelerometers – The Acceleration Sensing Glove