Everyone loves secrets – who doesn’t? Having secrets is the spice of life. Revealing secrets is even more exiting than keeping one – it’s a sweet feeling to lift the lid on a secret.

So what’s all about my secret talking?

Meg Grant, freelance web developer and eTextile enthusiast explored over the past 2 years the world of soft technology, combining everyday materials, add a good portion of creativity and transform these materials to lovely, unique objects.

Out of Meg’s portfolio, the Secret Keeper Glove shines with it’s simplicity of material selection, the creativity of user interaction and the great love to details that must have gone into the creation of this secret glove.

The Secret Keeper Glove makes use of the short message recording function of electronic greeting cards. The playback circuit and the button cell battery are part of the left hand glove. Activating the playback and listen to the secret of the glove is done by pressing thumb and forefinger together.

A microphone and LED is part of the right hand glove. The connection between the two gloves is made via various embroidered contact points on both gloves, linking up the microphone and the storage/playback part. I love this gesture activation following the way how people tell and listen to secrets typically by cupping their hands together to block out unwanted listening from by-standers.

I love the gesture activation, the beautifully designed contact points on the gloves and the concealed LED – gorgeous.

You must check out the demo video below – showing how the Secret Keeper Glove receives and reveals a secret message.

Meg Grant kept the Secret Keeper Glove so secret, I didn’t come across it until Jennifer revealed the secret around the Secret Keeper Glove on our Facebook fan page. Thanks Jennifer.

Inspired by the Secret Keeper Glove from Meg I think it’s time for me to work (finally) on a shirt to talk with and make good on my blog title talk2myShirt – ops, that was supposed to be my secret.

Talking with hands often refers to people who spice up their spoken words with generous gestures to hammer out the point they like to make.

Talking with hands is first and foremost a important communication form for people who unfortunately lost their hearing capability. There are other hand communication forms like people who spice up their spoken words with generous gestures to hammer out the point they like to make.

Interesting for both groups but most useful for the first one is a new developments made by a group from Osaka University and Shinshu University, a finger-language interface called Fingual.

The Fingual functions very much  like a microphone connected to a computer with the difference this it translates finger gestures into characters which are then fed into a text program.

The magic of gesture to written word transformation is made possible by magnets on the tip of each finger. A magnetic sensor measures the changes of the magnetic field as the fingers form different characters.

Each character formed be the fingers generates it’s distinctive magnetic field which is then matched with the set of magnetic data to character table – a simple yet genius principle. No huge processing power, finger tracking or the like.

A Photo-reflector on the glove produces a infrared light signal that transmits the finger signs to a computers text editor.

Spicing up gloves is one of the hottest congested items in the wearable technology arena. Concept studies and developments like the Fingual pointing towards meaningful and useful applications of soft, wearable tech.

[DigInfo via Ubergizmo]

Since our first article about the Keyglove end of last year Jeff Rowberg kept working and improving his Open Source Hardware project – the Keyglove.

The Keyglove is is based on the Arduino/AVR and acts as wireless input for electronic devices like computers and potentially for computer controlled equipment.

What sets the Keyglove apart from many other sensing glove products/concepts is the combination of 34 strategically placed contact sensors and smart controller software which makes it possible to implement the entire English alphabet using simple one-to-one sensor contacts.

Besides the Bluetooth wireless connectivity and rechargeable lithium polymer battery the Keyglove includes a simple vibration feedback, audio feedback, and a status indicator LED.

This all sounds cool and I can imagine that a high-tech gesture translator glove can be very useful to bridge the communication gab between man-machine like for operators of equipment in the field where hand gestures can be translated and transmitted to the heavy lifting robotic machines – just to name one of many possible and usefully application areas.

Jeff is now looking into the commercialization possibilities for the Keyglove and listed this project on Kickstarter. If you are interested in seeing the Keyglove become reality and have some money to fund a start-up, go to Kickstarter and give your backing to the Keyglove.

via: Engadget

As I mentioned some times ago gloves somehow do attract a big share of attention among the wearable technology community and fabulous ideas keep flowing.

Today’s interactive glove has been designed by Ashwin Rajan and Kevin Cannon with the intention to provide a gesture-based communication tool for firefighters, the Frontline Gloves.

Frontline Gloves are a pair of networked gloves that allow two fire-fighters to use hand gestures to communicate with each other in a fire-fighting situation.

Firefighters and other professions where communication and coordination is essential and life saving but high noise levels gesture communication is used. But when low visibility joins the game, gesture control does not help either, hence technology enhanced gloves like the Frontline Gloves and fill in the missing link.

Each glove contains the control electronics, a wireless XBee module, a sonar sensor which can detect distance in a low visibility environment and ultra-bright LEDs to display the gesture controlled information. The gestures are picked up by bend sensors in the fingers.

Although the purpose of the course was to learn about the Arduino platform, testing the prototyping potential on an hypothetical usage scenario, the duo has made a highly interesting design proposal with practical value and demonstrating the sheer unlimited possibilities not only of the Arduino platform but also the potential of wearable technologies.

Ashwin and Kevin deserve a thumbs up = OK send by the Frontline Glove.

We have seen our share on interactive gloves ranging from ‘just’ lighting up’ to the control of the virtual world on the computer. Gloves seems to be a prime target when it comes to electrify our wardrobe.

The Drum Glove System designed by Arnoud den Besten, Kristo de Pooter, Sam Vesters and Thomas Letermea, a group of students at the Artesis University College in Antwerp, setting the functionality level very high in the musical glove design concept category.

Drumming with your finger tips on the table is getting a complete different meaning and acoustic when you wear a pair for these Drum Gloves.

The Drum Glove system is a design concept study which envisions to have a full drum kit at your finger tips, controlled by the electronic in the backpack which also contains speakers and audio processing.

The team also imagines to enable multiple users to combine their (finger tip) drumming creating an out of this world drummer experience.

To demonstrate the how the Drum gloves could/will work the team made a video hammering away with their finger tips on a table top – impressive.

Sadly most of these cool design concepts never make it to the stores so if you really like that you might need to walk down the DIY lane.

[via: Designboom]

We are used to control almost every aspect of our physical world with our hands so it is no wonder that technology enhanced gloves have a great appeal among the creative, innovative minds.

Technology enhanced gloves bridge the gap between the physical, ‘real’ world with the imaginary, virtual world consisting of Bits and Bytes.

A first step of using intuitive gestures to control these Bytes was the introduction of Apple’s iPhone. In the meantime swiping, sliding and tapping has conquered the interface design of almost every new device coming to the market.

My expectation is this gesture control will sooner or later take over Keynote and Powerpoint presentation on wall screens, this sexy navigation style first seen in the movie Minority Report.

MIT students Tony Hyun Kim and Nevada Sanchez, fascinated from hand control, developed a Glove Mouse version using wireless technology bringing gesture control to a larger, presentation scale setting.

Based on an electrical engineering project in 2009, they upgraded the glove interface with wireless transmitters enabling the wearer to zoom around a map application, like using a smartphone touchscreen without the screen.

The gestures are picked up via a Webcam which ‘sees’ the LEDs in the finger tips serving as location pointer. Micro switches in the finder tips represent the buttons on a computer mouse. Putting these signals together and feed wirelessly into a computer program and you have one of the most sexiest presentation controls at your finger tips – the future iGlove?

Noticeable is the cost for all the components required to put this Glove Mouse together: less than $100.- Visit the project site where you can find detail information, parts list, system drawing and source code.

Seeing all the rumors around electronic gadget makers to add wall projection functions to notebooks and smart-phones I can very well imagine that gesture control via a glove mouse could be the next big thing for the accessory market.

[via: PopSci]

High tech gloves have been around for some time now, starting with sophisticated heating systems, making phone calls via Bluetooth link to a cell phone or controlling an iPod.

Zanier, an Austrian based company has announced the most innovative and technically sophisticated glove on the planet, the X-Plore.XGX with integrated GPS and mini display on the thumb.

While I do not think the GPS will be very helpful of avoiding to get lost on the ski slopes I do like the additional functions GPS technology offers: the measurement of altitude, speed, distance, duration and other route data. All these data can be check on the small display but they are also stored and can be downloaded to a computer via USB.

This recording of the action makes it for me an perfect synergy of technology with clothing. No additional piece of gear is needed to fill up the pockets, just put on your gloves and you get a complete action recorder. And having already GPS on the finger tips – yes you can rest assured to never get lost anymore during your ski vacation.

Hardcore action winter sport enthusiast have now their own flight recorder in the gloves, recording those incredible races down the hills and can show them off on their social websites as proof of their high adrenalin vacation in the Alps.

Zanier plans to introduce the GPS gloves for the 2010-11 winter season. No price point is set yet but you have now 12 month time to save up for these top of the line gloves.

[source: ISPO media services]

This weeks wearable electronic DIY project introduction is not very challenging on the eTextile part but it is one of the most outstanding projects I have seen around the interactive glove topic.

The Atlas Gloves, created by Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv at the ITP – NYU, act as a physical interface for controlling 3D mapping applications like Google Earth but the available documentation and software is highly hackable and can be modified to act like a mouse input device.

The user/computer interface is a pair of illuminating gloves which track intuitive hand gestures like grabbing, pulling, reaching or rotating.

A simple web-cam attached to a computer translates each LED-enabled gesture into a set of possible actions: pan, zoom, rotate and tilt. The video tracking functionality is written within the Processing programming framework, in conjunction with Java’s java.awt.Robot library.

This robot library converts a special video tracking vocabulary into mouse clicks/releases and cursor movement in order to control the computer.

This basically allows to use the light tracking function to use gesture control for a wide range of computer applications, like presentation, photo viewing, Goolge Earth or games.

The Open Source Atlas Gloves application can be downloaded at the Atlas Gloves project Website on which you will also find a complete overview with step-by-step guide how to make the gloves.

Although the Atlas Gloves project was made in 2006, Dan and Mushon still check the forum and follow up on reader questions via the comments on their site.

I am not a software expert but reading through all the infos it does look fairly simple, thanks to the excellent project documentation and ready to use software code, to rebuild the 3D gesture interface gloves.

Moving objects around on the screen by waving with a hand is so cool, so like Minority Report style, the trend setter in computer interaction.

Interactive gloves made it back into our headlines. We have covered recently the more simpler but yet very useful, I might even say essential touch screen gloves without which we are running around with frozen fingers or with our inability to receive even something simple like a cell phone call.

Designer William Mazuel envisions a much smarter glove, a glove the contains a two-way radio and a digital audio player. The gloves are not only a two-way radio and MP3 player, they also control those function via gestures.

We have seen very smart glove concept designs in the past but William combines all the smartness into one and the same glove including the user interaction with the communication and entertainment function.

I am not sure right now where the target market could be for such a very smart glove, mountain rescue might be interested into a hands-free communication device but does a smart glove qualify to be called hands-free?

[via: Yanko Design]

As most of the newer personal devices feature touch sensitive input usually via the screen, operating them during cold winter days can become an annoyance. Conventional, old tech gloves have to be taken off before one can even pick up a phone call.

See, electronic technology advances at a high speed but we or our clothing sometimes fall behind this rapid development and we are not able to operate them properly at times.

Touch sensitive gloves have been around for a year now as some innovative minds figured out the problem and a solution by adding conductive yarn patches on the tip of the index finger which will make the necessary skin resistance contact with the touch screens’ surface.

As with any new innovation and product idea, over time simple and limited offers on the market will expand through new companies joining the this market segment.

Gaspar Gloves is offering for this winter season a range of TouchTec® gloves which are based on a patented nano-technology that gives new functionality to a variety of textiles and leather. It enables the wearer of TouchTec Gloves to operate any touch screen devices without removing gloves.

The touch sensible gloves come in a range of different styles for women and men and can be picked up here with prices ranging from $225.- up to almost $300.- but how much value would you put on having warm fingers while operating your touch sensitive devices?

[via: ChipChick]