Saturday, December 01, 2012

[brdvfpbs] Peregrine gaming glove ideas

The Peregrine Gaming Glove is an intriguing product.  Some thoughts.

Use key sequences to be able to type any key.  Assuming 40 buttons, then 1600 two-key sequences.  This will require OS assistance.

Two handed use with right-handed Frogpad.

Glove on one hand, typing into smartphone held in the other.  No Bluetooth, but perhaps some hack with USB OTG.

As an interface for an electronic musical instrument.

Several open questions:  Is it technically possible to type chords, i.e., for example, ring finger on palm, thumb to index finger simultaneously?  What is the behavior when the glove detects a chord?

What is the required delay between consecutive keypresses?  How many milliseconds of electrical contact are required to register a key press?  Alternating the thumb between two adjacent fingers could achieve tremendously fast keystrokes, perhaps like binary.  However, too low a timing threshold probably causes electrical bouncing, where a single press registers multiple contacts.

How precisely in time can a user push a key, and precisely release a key?  This will matter for the musical instrument, but also probably matters in games.  Part of the difficulty is the hand and flesh is soft and squishy.

They should open up the source code to the glove keymapping software. It would allowing for porting to operating systems. And applications which "live" reprogram the glove, perhaps automatically detecting which actions the user does frequently and offering to provide a hotkey for it. And allows the glove to work with small wearable computers, which often run operating systems other than Windows, and may not even have a display.

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