PowerGlove Information
The PowerGlove Project was Mankind's last, best hope for peace.
No. That's not right. Lemme start over.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
Okay. I'll stop dicking around.
A few years back, a friend and sometimes collaborator by the name
of Frank Coleman (Chief Eccentric Officer of Twenty-First Century Art)
loaned me his Mattel/Nintendo PowerGlove with the proviso that I try to
figure out some way of patching it into a computer. At the time, another
friend and I were trying to hack a Cybermaxx head-mounted display into an
Amiga 2000 (but that's another story). Frank was hoping to be able to
interface the glove with his Mac and use them to generate MIDI data.
Kind of a Theremin, if you will.
This was before the Web and waaaay before Altavista/Yahoo/Lycos. My only
option, other than Compu$erve, was to thrash blindly around gopherspace.
Somehow, my search actually turned up some useful information. I found
schematics, source code, text files describing Mac/PC/Amiga interfaces,
and even a FAQ-like substance.
We never completed the project. Certain other projects (like earning a
living) sort of got in the way. The glove sat in a corner of my studio,
along with the breadboard and a subset of the necessary components, gathering
dust.
Fast-forward to the present: I decided to resurrect the project. Andrew Lypps,
one of my housemates and an audio engineer with an EE background, has been hired to perform the necessary electro-voudou. Frank Coleman has agreed to invoke the XOBJ deities for the software side. The PowerGlove will live again! I'm looking forward to using it to trigger percussion samples. I suspect that
the glove has a role in Frank's plans for world domination (cf. the Flying
Glove in Yellow Submarine).
This is a first attempt at providing some of the resources I've found to
the Rest of the World. It is by no means complete. Some of it is out of
date. But it is better than nothing. I will augment these resources in
my "copious free time". Comments, additions, and flames are most welcome.
E-mail to ktakki@artcrime.com is the expressway to my skull.
Anyway, here are some links to what I've found. Hope this is of some use. Enjoy.
