Day 017: Glove Controller Progress #1

I'VE GOT IT: USB sock--

USB sock

Cool right! You can plug a USB cord into anything and make it cooler.

The USB sock, however, is equipped with an Arduino prototyping board and an accelerometer. What does this mean? You can move your hand in any which direction and get statistics about it for each axis:

• Whether the equilibrium is disturbed
• Which direction you moved in
• How fast you moved

Reading hand move up, then down

See the first 2 blue boxes in that Processing screenshot? They represent me moving my hand up. The last two bars represent me moving my hand back down.

The key will be to find patterns of how you move your hand for certain game attacks (like to shoot something, you'll swing your hand in front of you). You record that pattern, and when you do it again, the program will recognize it and know that you just made the action for shooting something.

These patterns will be made of up of 3 spatial axes:

• X-axis movement (side-to-side)
• Y-axis movement (up and down)
• Z-axis movement (forward and back)

And 3 rotational axes:

• X-axis twist (pitch)
• Y-axis twist (yaw)
• Z-axis twist (roll)

Also known as the 6 degrees of freedom. Then -- in the case that this starts working -- I'll have the computer feed controls to the PS3. 

It's foolproof! Except for these few minor problems:

1. There may be major processing lag
2. Only 2 axes work at a time right now -- any more and the graph gets shabby
3. Right now I'm only HOPING 6 degrees of freedom are enough to distinguish between hundreds of a character's moves (I don't have any solid evidence that it will)

My immediate goals:

1. Read 3 axes without things slowing down
2. Get the program to display -- in words -- which direction I'm moving in