Project: Essential Reality P5 Data Glove News (2005-09-12) Essential Reality seems to have changed name to Alliance Distributors, and the P5 resource URLs have been changed accordingly. (2005-06-30) This website created. Introduction The Essential Reality P5 data glove is an amazingly affordable data glove for PC and Macintosh computers. The device comes with full 6DOF tracking (position as well as rotation) as well as finger bend tracking, and the price is incredibly low; the quoted sales price is approximately $40 (even better deals are possible--our pristine unit cost $9 on Ebay). This is done through the use of an infrared tracking system. We have done some rudimentary experimentation with the P5 glove and have developed a simple C++ API for its use; see the download section below for links to the code. Our implementation uses a clean tracker API, allowing for future extension, and performs simple average filtering to reduce the jitter from the device. The test application shows a simple 3D hand controlled by the glove using OpenGL and the P5 API. Picture Gallery People & Contact Feel free to contact any of the people involved in this project for questions, feedback, praise, and criticism (the e-mail addresses below have been obviously modified to circumvent spambots). Niklas Elmqvist (elm#at#cs.chalmers.se) You may also contact the authors using the following address: Niklas Elmqvist Department of Computing Science Chalmers University of Technology SE-412 96 Goteborg SWEDEN Telephone: +46-(0)31-772 1024 Fax: +46-(0)31-16 56 55 Future Work We hope to improve our sample code with improved filtering, including dynamically adjusting the size of the averaging filter depending on the rate of change of motion and rotational data. Furthermore, it would be interesting to develop the Tracker API into a more generic form and implement more than one device for it. Download Below is some code related to this project that we have made available for others to download and look at. Please note that there is no warranty whatsoever associated with the use of this code, use it at your own risk! Feel free to contact me if you are interested in using this code in your own projects. P5 Hand - simple P5 hand demonstration written in C++ using GLUT and the P5 Windows API. Not likely to compile on anything else than Win32 platforms, this demonstration is nevertheless better and cleaner than the standard P5Motion code that comes with the P5 SDK. Links Alliance Distributors - (formerly known as Essential Reality) manufacturers of the P5 data glove. P5 Developer's Site - direct link to the developer central for the P5 data glove. Here you can find the P5 SDK, among other things. P5 Discussions - Yahoo discussion group for the P5 glove (primarily development-related stuff). CyberWorld - a Canadian VR reseller that among other things also carries the P5. Also look for "cwonline" on Ebay; there you can P5 units for as low as $10. [ Home | Research | Teaching | Courses | Personal ] Updated 2005-09-12 by Niklas Elmqvist (elm#at#cs.chalmers.se).