Is this the new musical Power Glove? Imogen Heap thinks so. The Grammy winner rocked the stylish hand warmers at a TEDGlobal 2011 event in Edinburgh, Scotland, creating gesture-based music during a four-minute demonstration, with the gloves wirelessly connected to a nearby laptop. Could this be the death of the theremin as we know it, or just another good excuse to do a caption contest?
Brian: “Imogen there’s no heaven.” Terrence: “Ms. Heap hard at work on a sequel to the NES “classic” Bad Street Brawler, tentatively titled Street Corner Complainer.” Darren: “Seriously? Wires?” Brad: “Now if only I could find some oven mitts that would magically bake cookies for me, I’d be set!” Jon: “Force enhancing gloves allow Imogen to one up Luke, raise X-Wing.” Tim: “Do I look intense enough now? Too pensive? What if I tilt my head up a bit further?” Amar: “And then they handed me the Grammy and I grabbed it like this and then — oh, have I already told you this story?” Dante: “What do you mean they aren’t cashmere?!?!” Joseph: “So I was holding Bjork’s leg up like this, but she still couldn’t get over Madonna’s gate.” Sean: “To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub…” Christopher: “Please sir, I beg you — don’t take my Flowbee away.” Richard Lai: “Ceiling cat, come to momma.”
[Image credit: University of the West of England]
Caption Contest: A heaping helping of wearable music originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Jeff’s back and gives us a rundown of his minivacation to Atlantic City, N.J., and his love affair with pinball machines. A lot of other stories to talk about today, like the Zune HD, the new Chevy Volt, Spielberg taking over the Halo movie, and Hayato Shimizu’s interpretation of Jeff as the superhero COMMODORE!
Jeff Bakalar as COMMODORE
(Credit: Hayato Shimizu)
The team is back together now that Jeff is back from his trip to Atlantic City, where he reportedly spent the majority of his time playing blackjack and a series of analog video games like Batman: Dark Knight pinball, skeeball, and bubble hockey. In celebration of Jeff’s return, we surprise him with the image you see above, the final superhost of The 404–COMMODORE! Defending the world from positive vibes with his giant hockey stick, Commodore also wields the might Power Glove, which, unfortunately, is incompatible with today’s villains, but it still looks cool! Big thanks goes out to Hayato Shimizu for his great work with all three characters, maybe we’ll even seen a picture featuring LaserJet, G-Force, and Commodore battling crime for the future of podcasting!
(Credit: The 404)
As usual, we have a lot to talk about today, and kick it off with some rumor mongering about the latest Zune HD. CNET’s own Donald Bell reports that Amazon is showing off retail pricing for the portable media player, listing the 16GB Zune HD at $219 and the 32GB at $289. The rumor mill continues to churn over Steven Spielberg taking over as producer for the Halo movie adaption, although the three of us are still skeptical about any long-form video game story adaptation, as we all remember what happened with CHUN-LI. We also look at the latest commercials for the Chevy Volt and its how viral advertising is affecting viewer participation.
Finally, Wilson G. Tang took it upon himself to create a 404 Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X users! You can download the video or the audio version and have the show play in the background while you finish “working.” Best of all, this blog description populates nicely into the widget as well, making it super easy to auto-update and listen to your favorite episodes! Download them and let us know what you think!
We all remember the Power Glove as basically a broken promise. Well, here’s your chance to have that grip-control fantasy fulfilled: the AcceleGlove is a control interface that senses your fingers’ positions via accelerometers and uses them to control, say, that oversized Armatron they’ve got there in the video.
Remember Armatron?
Ah yeah.
Anyway, the AcceleGlove is, as you may guess from the guy’s spiel in the video, actually aimed at professional and military situations where a lightweight but precise control mechanism is needed for some basic navigational work with, say, a packbot. You probably won’t see it as an accessory any time soon, although the Peregrine Glove will be available soon if you feel the need to do some hand-based control.
The AcceleGlove, unfortunately, only detects things like bending your fingers, making a fist and so on, no waving or sign-language detection here. It comes with an open-source SDK, however, so you can always try hacking on some Wiimote parts.
Remember how almost everyone went “meh” when Nintendo previewed the Wii Vitality Sensor at E3 2009? Well, according to Reggie, we just don’t get it and will eventually come around once the developers create the right experence.
Fast Company interviewed Nintendo’s North American President Reggie Fils-Aime about all things Nintendo and this was one small section out of the great Q&A session.
So what I can tell you is this. You and I probably had a very similar conversation when we first showed the Nintendo DS: how is it going to work, why a touch screen, voice activation–I don’t get it. We probably had a similar conversation about the Wii Remote: how is this going to work, how is it going to work with the games that I want to play–I don’t get it. Now I’m hearing something similar for the Wii Vitality Sensor. And all I can tell you is, with the game developers that we have, we will bring forth an experience that you will say, “Wow, I get it.”
Until you have that software, it’s tough to understand. If I told you that you would be standing on an oversized bathroom scale, and having fun doing it, you probably would have said, “Reggie, I don’t get it.” And yet here we are with the balance board arguably as the third largest development platform across the globe.
I, for one, can’t wait to see how the Vitality Sensor will be used. Hopefully it won’t find a place in the crowded Nintendo Hall of Shame along with the Power Glove, Virtual Gameboy, SNES Mouse, and R.O.B.
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Remember how almost everyone went “meh” when Nintendo