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The Data Typing Glove
Same with this early data glove device,
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_MgQM9kCIup0/TK0kwOtNTXI/AAAAAAAAARs/3tBvOl0WKKQ/s1600/NES-PowerGlove.jpg
"One of the first instrumented gloves described in the literature was the Sayre Glove, developed by Tom Defanti and Daniel Sandin in a 1977 project for the National Endowment for the Arts. (In 1962 Uttal from IBM patented a glove for teaching touch typing, but it was not general purpose enough to be used in VR applications.) The Sayre glove used light based sensors with flexible tubes with a light source at one end and a photocell at the other. As the fingers were bent, the amount of light that hit the photocells varied, thus providing a measure of finger flexion. The glove, based on an idea by colleague Rich Sayre, was an inexpensive, lightweight glove that could monitor hand movements by measuring the metacarpophalangeal joints of the hand. It provided an effective method for multidimensional control, such as mimicking a set of sliders.
The first widely recognized device for measuring hand positions was developed by Dr. Gary Grimes at Bell Labs. Patented in 1983, Grimes' Digital Data Entry Glove had finger flex sensors, tactile sensors at the fingertips, orientation sensing and wrist-positioning sensors. The positions of the sensors themselves were changeable. It was intended for creating "alpha-numeric'' characters by examining hand positions. It was primarily designed as an alternative to keyboards, but it also proved to be effective as a tool for allowing non-vocal users to "finger-spell'' words using such a system.
This was soon followed by an optical glove, which was later to become the VPL DataGlove. This glove was built by Thomas Zimmerman, who also patented the optical flex sensors used by the gloves. Like the Sayre glove, these sensors had fibre optic cables with a light at one end, and a photodiode at the other. Zimmerman had also built a simplified version, called the Z-glove, which he had attached to his Commodore 64. This device measured the angles of each of the first two knuckles of the fingers using the fibre optic devices, and was usually combined with a Polhemus tracking device. Some also had abduction measurements. This was really the first commercially available glove, however at about $9000 was prohibitively expensive." http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/lesson17.html
Sturman, D.J. and Zeltzer, D., A survey of glove-based input, Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE , V14 #1, Jan. 1994,30 -39
http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/images/small/grimes-glove.jpg
