Making waves: Gloves offer fingertip control

Cambridge, Massachusetts – The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a pair of colourful Lycra gloves that enable people to interact with a computer screen through hand gestures.

Unlike other gesture-based interfaces, when held in front of a webcam, the gloves generate a unique pattern with every wave of the hand or flex of the finger. These movements are then matched against a database of gestures and translated into commands for the computer.

Gamers navigating a virtual world could pick up and wield objects simply by using hand gestures. In the video demonstrating the gloves, a person stacks 3D cubes on top of each other. Engineers and designers could also use the system to manipulate 3D models of commercial products or large civic structures more easily and intuitively, according to MIT. For more on their clever innovations, read a recent Seed about the invisible mouse.