Augmented Hyper-Reality Glove by ZJ-Weaver
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The Carnegie Mellon HCI gang is at it again, this time taking on the serious assignment of making a thing for PLAY. The Royal Play that is. The thing that makes life worth living.

This time, we've combined our nerd-ness to bring some of your favorite movie sound effects to life. The " Augmented Hyper-Reality Glove" uses flex and tilt sensors to send signals to a Wave Shield from Adafruit Industries. The Wave Shield lets you trigger uncompressed sound files directly with Arduino, eliminating the need to call files from your computer.

When you punch with the glove you get a "punch" sound, when you make a pistol shape, a "gunfire" sound, etc. The possibilities are limited only to your imagination, and your world will be augmented by the sounds you normally only hear in your head or make yourself (legitimizing those embarrassing moments when other people hear you doing it).

Team: Becca Chen, Zack Jacobson-Weaver, Jimmy Krahe & Spencer Sugarman from Activating Objects with Eric Paulos and developed at CodeLab.

Let's get started...
 
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Step 1: What You'll Need

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Tools: Soldering Equipment, Wire Cutters, Scissors, Needle and Thread, Arduino board (here's a link for everything you need to use it), Lady Ada Wave Shield for Arduino, Solderless Breadboard, Hot Glue Gun, SD Card Formatter with one SD Card, your favorite Mac or PC.

Materials: One Glove, Solder (and some skills, the Wave Shield is a marathon soldering session), Conductive Thread, Electrical Tape, Anti-Static Sheeting, Regular Sewing Thread and a Needle (and a thimble for you sensitive types), Aluminum or Copper Foil Tape, Electrical Wire ( there are two kinds used here: Solid and Stranded. You'll see why later), Velcro and Velcro Straps, Hot Glue Sticks.
Catsunami says: Dec 18, 2011. 2:46 AM
I made these as you described, but they don't seem to work at all :(
Catsunami says: Dec 18, 2011. 2:48 AM
And I'm talking about the flexsensors here.
ZJ-Weaver (author) says: Dec 18, 2011. 7:05 AM
Hmm. Maybe I can help you debug. Something simple is causing a problem. I say this not because I don't believe you. Only because we've used these same sensors at my lab for the past 4 months and if they're made and wired correctly, they're great. Can you tell me how you made them? And how are you reading them? Through Arduino? And how are they wired into the circuit?
Catsunami says: Dec 18, 2011. 8:44 AM
Well after a few hours and scouting the internet for other methods, I got some working. However, I ended up not using the anti-static bags at all - I think it is because none of mine are actually conductive. I used conductive foam that ICs get jammed into during transport. I also found that electrical tape does not hold it together well enough and there are contact gaps, so I used duct tape.
And since I was getting really jumpy readings with conductive thread (I suspect that a single strand can get disconnected at random times), I used multistranded copper wire.

Sooo I guess I kind of changed everything, but thanks anyways!
ZJ-Weaver (author) says: Dec 18, 2011. 9:17 AM
Awesome. That's the spirit. What are you making?
Catsunami says: Dec 18, 2011. 10:15 AM
Also a glove, but planning to control my robot with it. Kind of feel like pretending I have superpowers or something by waving my hands around and making gestures :D I'm also planning to add accelerometers to it.
ZJ-Weaver (author) says: Dec 18, 2011. 11:10 AM
Cool. I'll be watching for it.

I'm currently setting up a processing program to control the screen with invisible forces (or photo resistor values). Superpowers, indeed.

Good luck.
ashannon1 says: Oct 30, 2011. 12:01 AM
could you hook this up to a USB cable, and use this on a video-game?
ZJ-Weaver (author) says: Oct 30, 2011. 7:42 AM
You could! It would be a fairly complex hack but (I'm guessing here) you could probably:

Break down your video game controller and literally find out, of all the wires going from the controller to the console, (this is assuming you're using a wired controller. Do they even make those anymore?) which one is assigned to what button, lever motion, tilt etc. You would have to do this by providing power to the controller and grounding it as well. It would be akin to measuring analog input on Arduino.

If you look at my only other Instructable, you can see how we used analog input to turn stuff on and off. That's also what the glove does. That also what a WIRED video game controller does. Otherwise it is a digital input which, for most purposes, works (outputs) the same way.

Then comes the real challenge. You have to "map" the output of the glove to the output of the controller. So, for instance, lets say you have a "B" button on your controller. You could hard wire your index finger to the B wire of the controller and it could then send signals (switch on/ switch off) to the game console. Etc, etc. etc.

What I'm not explaining here is exactly what it means to sort out these wires, power them, and "map" one controller (the one that came with your game system) to a new controller (like the glove). For me that would be tricky.

But can it be done? I say, anything CAN be done!

To quote Ra's al Ghul, Batman's Ninja coach, "You're training is nothing! You're WILL is everything!"

Jandro says: Oct 29, 2011. 1:12 PM
Kind of looks like the gunslinger from tf2.
http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Gunslinger
FetterChiller says: Oct 28, 2011. 1:12 PM
Hi. Cool project :D (even if extremly nerdy :P)
I would like to build some of these flexsensors for another project, What kind of output do these give? How precise are they?
ZJ-Weaver (author) says: Oct 28, 2011. 2:18 PM
They give an analogue input which will Serial.read a resistance value. It actually depends on the individual piece. We've seen ranges from 0-300 or even 0-700.

These also work as pressure sensors so try it both ways.

Cheers,
brunomoraes says: Oct 27, 2011. 4:58 PM
(removed by author or community request)
ZJ-Weaver (author) says: Oct 27, 2011. 7:28 PM
Hi Bruno, check out this website. These gloves are crazy:

http://www.ytgloves.com/products.asp

They are VERY expensive but VERY VERY durable. I paid about $35 US for these but they're my second pair and the first pair made it through about 2 1/2 years of mountain biking (i.e. me catching my fall as I'm sliding down dirt and gravel).

Plus they look cool!
Istarian says: Oct 27, 2011. 11:48 AM
You should consider redoing this with a smaller protoboard, maybe like one of these commercial products Sparkfun sells:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9102
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9101

They are circular LilyPad protoboards.

and use conductive thread to tie the sensors into the wave shield.
ZJ-Weaver (author) says: Oct 27, 2011. 12:16 PM
Agreed. This is first prototype level. The full documentation comes as the hybrid offspring of LOVE FOR OPEN SOURCE(yay!) + CLASS REQUIREMENT(booo). So in a given time frame we struggle to get a working prototype coupled with the academic baggage (which is obviously truly good).

Regardless, you're point is well-taken. Clean it up!

Thank you for the ideas and links.
User116 says: Oct 27, 2011. 6:32 AM
Great project! What are the total costs of the components in this project?
ZJ-Weaver (author) says: Oct 27, 2011. 7:27 AM
Hard to say as some of the stuff was repurposed from other worlds. To guestimate (I have now become my father) I would say,

Glove: free - $35 (any glove would work)
Wave Shield $25+/-
Flex Sensors $10
Arduino and Other Electronics $30 (???)
Misc $10

It realistically costs $100 plus assuming you have nothing to start with. Now that you ask, I see that's pretty high.

The price point on a commercial product should be less than $35 a PAIR!

You also don't need gloves that cost $35. Ours did, but it's a high quality (Youngstown) glove that kinda looks cool to start with.

There are lots of places, I suppose, to trim the fat.
VerendusVir says: Oct 26, 2011. 2:47 PM
Dude, its awesome!
ZJ-Weaver (author) says: Oct 25, 2011. 11:13 AM
Please enjoy the new Promo Video from Jimmy "Scorsese" Krahe!
Saurian24 says: Oct 22, 2011. 10:43 PM
Wow this is very cool... I will definitely have to see about trying to build this.
Kiteman says: Oct 22, 2011. 3:29 AM
Cool - is there a video of it in action?

(You know, even it hadn't worked, this still looks way cool!)
ZJ-Weaver (author) says: Oct 22, 2011. 6:11 AM
Done and done, Kiteman. We didn't have all the bugs worked out as you'll see in the video (step 8). I'm sure your's will be better!
Kiteman says: Oct 22, 2011. 8:06 AM
That's great - love the smile as well.
ZJ-Weaver (author) says: Oct 22, 2011. 5:54 AM
Yes! Kiteman, we do have a short video demo and another video promo to post. Unfortunately, YouTube must have a monster backlog so we're waiting for that to upload. I'll let you know when it's up.
Cheers,
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