Any DIY glove / bodysuit makers out there?

Hey cyber. I like the powerglove ones... but they are so very expensive for ten digits. The thumbs were different in the powerglove and I don't know if they sell those. I might have some extras if you need any... but who knows where they ended up in my shop lol

You know I bought about 40 powergloves back in 1992... there was a wall of hundreds of them at this close out center I used to shop at. I still have a bunch of sensors from them somewhere. Sold most on ebay... I didn't like them anyhow. Very uncomfortable. And you can make bendsensors of that style diy also. I started work on that a long time ago but moved on to other things.

Lightpipes look cool though! and they can actually act as an indicator for your friends to laugh at you when your leg gets blown off (in game) and the lights turn off. With a bodysuit driven motion then you'd actually have to hop :)

There are other options also... piezo thermoplastics. I have some that was manufactured in reusable holographic film (from physics research work) and thinking about seeing how it responds to various deformations.

So many options really, huh?

I have some very exciting things coming up hopefully soon similar to that pololu module. Have some friends that just developed a nike fuel band like device that is loaded with many more biometric and movenment sensors and a full led matrix all embedded in silicon :) perfect application... except it's bluetooth. Not sure about latency on that.

oh i ramble... so excited to work on vr stuff after so many years! Please share any ideas or knowledge you have about the dataglove project.

Hey cyber, if you are interested in testing out lightpipe sensors yourself ... PM me.. :)

Body suits are definitely going to be the next big wave in VR controllers, unless something like the Kinect is going to be good enough to replace it. Consumer versions of body suits would be way cheaper than omnidirectional treadmills, for one thing.

But I'm a software engineer. This means my first thoughts go to coming up with a standard for transmitting the bodysuit data and an API for using it. What is out there now?

I would hazard a guess that Flock of Birds would be a good place to start looking for calibration. Polhemus G4 being another?

"jackwilliambell" wrote:
This means my first thoughts go to coming up with a standard for transmitting the bodysuit data and an API for using it. What is out there now?

Ya, like a VRHID driver standard or something. Hardware side also needs standards.
A single hub that any compliant sensor can be plugged into. That will all help with reducing wires, calibration, interoperability of different sensors/controllers from different companies. Maybe handle data from an HMD also.. and with usb3 maybe video also and power.

I'll be back to working on this next week. I also have a new sensor method I discovered while stitching together my first prototype using bends. Cant wait to finish it and show it off... but it's crunch time this weekend on some contract work I'm loathing.

"Felix12g" wrote:

I would hazard a guess that Flock of Birds would be a good place to start looking for calibration. Polhemus G4 being another?

Do you mean for tracking?

For tracking I'm playing with the module cyber mentioned.
http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1268
I have it up and running with the arduino library but they're only outputting 3DOF so I'll have to see what I can do with the raw data and with mixing in some other data from other sensors first. I wanna keep everything as open source and DIY as possible. Pretty darn smooth readings out of the box on it. and only 40$ for gyro/acc/mag.

"itcamefrommars" wrote:
... For tracking I'm playing with the module cyber mentioned.
http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1268
I have it up and running with the arduino library but they're only outputting 3DOF so I'll have to see what I can do with the raw data and with mixing in some other data from other sensors first. I wanna keep everything as open source and DIY as possible. Pretty darn smooth readings out of the box on it. and only 40$ for gyro/acc/mag.

I got this "9DOF" sensor, also recommended by cybereality, for $13.99 with free shipping:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/310513793857

And I got a pair of these 3-axis accelerometers ($4.69 for two, with free shipping), to add supplementary body and/or limb tracking:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200916416916

And this GPS, with USB and TTL serial pads on the back ($9.69+1.90 shipping)
http://www.ebay.com/itm/350753812611
and this GPS patch antenna ($4.51, free shipping):
http://www.ebay.com/itm/251265487253
but a lot of people use a simple DIY GPS dipole antenna instead:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1159968

And I also got this barometric pressure (altitude) sensor to detect sitting/standing ($6.99, free shipping):
http://www.ebay.com/itm/280936515643

All of the above will end up mounted in my VR gear at some point in the near future.

I have a box full of PowerGloves from the olden days, but I do not want to steal parts out of them just yet. Has anybody had experience with DIY flex sensors like this?:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Stickytape-Sensors/

Geek, what are you thinking to use to interpret and serialize the data?
I'm projecting there will be alot of signals coming in and alot of computation done on my plans. Jeez... just a quick count in my head and I'm over 30 sensors of one sort or another!

I'm playing with arduino right now because there was a library for it for the polulu module.
But that's not going to cut it for much more than a simple hand with maybe only 4 fingers at first.
I'm thinking an arm or maybe even propeller since it has multiple cores and I've used them.

OH, might actually get an FPGA dev board. Could use it to mine cryptocurrency too and have my VR gear pay for itself when I'm using. :shock:

"itcamefrommars" wrote:
Geek, what are you thinking to use to interpret and serialize the data?
I'm projecting there will be alot of signals coming in and alot of computation done on my plans. Jeez... just a quick count in my head and I'm over 30 sensors of one sort or another! ...

Neural nets like lots of inputs:
http://diydrones.ning.com/profiles/blogs/705844:BlogPost:33831



You can connect a lot of devices to i2c, but that limits your update rate per device. I have plenty of embedded controllers of various sorts with GPIO, including a few STM32F3DISCOVERY kits that each have an onboard 9DOF IMU.

I plan to use a servomotor-driven head and neck model to train the neural net, adjusting connection strengths depending on the difference between known and measured positions, at many positions. I have about 70 R/C servos I have not used yet...

"itcamefrommars" wrote:
Geek, what are you thinking to use to interpret and serialize the data?
I'm projecting there will be alot of signals coming in and alot of computation done on my plans. Jeez... just a quick count in my head and I'm over 30 sensors......

You are right... We use 3*17 sensors to capture full body motion. You'll need 3*15 , if I'm counting right , for one hand by using inertial sensors.

http://youtu.be/DPGEG8U7Be8

Hi
I've watched the very impressive the video of the VR control at E3 2014 : :o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbRwfI3uAwM

I would really like to know whether it would be possible to create a DIY version of this one. The price is quite low for this type of product I think ($650 at the Kickstarter : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/controlvr/control-vr-motion-capture-for-vr-animation-and-mor ), but if we could manager to lower the price and open the technology by a DIY version, it would be so interesting!