Power Glove
From Academic Kids
The Power Glove is a controller accessory for the Nintendo Entertainment System made by Mattel.
This controller was unique in the fact that it was a glove instead of the normal controller. On the glove it included a set of controls like a normal controller. It also included a program button and buttons labeled 0-9. A person would hit the program button and a numbered button to do various things (such as increase or decrease the firing rate of the A and B buttons). Along with the controller, someone could move their hand in various movements to control the character on-screen.
It was based on the patented technology of the VPL Dataglove, but with many modifications that allowed it to be used with a slow hardware and sold at an affordable price. Where the Dataglove could detect yaw, pitch and roll, used fiber optics to detect finger flexure and had a resolution of 256 positions (8 bits) per 5 fingers, the Power Glove could only detect roll, used sensors coated with conductive ink and had a resolution of 4 positions (2 bits) per 4 fingers. This allowed the Power Glove to store all the finger flexure information in a single byte.
Various games were made just for the use of the Power Glove, and it also appeared in the movie The Wizard.
While the Power Glove was never a popular input device for the NES, it later gained tremendous popularity among virtual reality enthusiasts as a cyberglove. This was mostly due to its low cost and high availability.
See also
External links
- Power Glove FAQ (http://www.angelfire.com/ca7/mellott124/glove.htm)
