My grad student Oskar Palinko has written on this site about his work on a cool glove to be used as a press-to-talk (PTT) device. The glove has built-in buttons that can be used as PTT buttons when interacting with a speech user interface. We’re currently using the glove to test how drivers would benefit from a “floating” PTT button in vehicles. We’re also hoping to use the glove with handheld devices - the idea here would be to have a wireless headset tied to the handheld and the glove would provide the PTT button. Both the in-car application and the handheld application are ubiquitous computing applications (or pervasive or ambient computing applications, if you prefer those terms), thus I call the glove a ubicomp glove.

Many other researchers and companies are using gloves in various ubicomp settings. For example, there’s the cellphone glove by G-Cell. This glove, as the name says, is a cell phone:

Then there’s the iPod-controlling ski glove by Reusch.

The most interesting ubicomp glove I’ve come across is the control glove by Engineered Fibre Structures:

The company is a University of Manchester spin-off. It was started by two professors in the Department of Textiles. According to this post, you control devices by touching a finger to the thumb. This creates an electrical circuit with the conductive pathways that are woven into the fabric of the glove and triggers the transmission of a signal via the glove’s Bluetooth transmitter.

Andrew Kun

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