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The CaptoGlove Motion Controller Gets A KickStarter (Update: Funded)

Sergio de Cristofaro In the news

Update, 4/3/17, 4:20am PT: The CaptoGlove surpassed its $50,000 Kickstarter goal in just 13 days. The company also announced a stretch goal that will add pressure sensitivity to the thumb part of the glove (10kg). The folks behind CaptoGlove said that “this will enable future customization, as well as more precise measurements of what the finger is doing,” which apparently will take the form of its “CaptoHaptic Kit.”

The company also said that the gloves are in production and on track to ship to early Kickstarter backers in May.

Original article, 3/20/17, 1:10pm PT:

The CaptoGlove is an input device (er, garment?) meant for a variety of platforms–its creator seems to be aiming for “platform agnostic”–including the PC, mobile devices, and for XR. It’s designed to allow you to ditch standard input devices such as gamepads, keyboards, and mice, and the company making it, also called CaptoGlove, has just launched a Kickstarter campaign.

It’s important to understand what the CaptoGlove is and isn’t. When we tried out the CaptoGlove at GDC, we played through a VR version of Left For Dead, and the CaptoGlove served as our trigger finger. Regardless of the weapon we wielded, we stalked around with our right hand in a “gun” gesture, and we pulled an imaginary trigger with our right index finger to blast zombies. It also detects motion, so you as you move your hand, your view can move around, too. The glove offers 10 degrees of freedom (10Dof), and the company said that each glove can support up to 20 individual controls. With a pair of CaptoGloves, then, one could enjoy 40 different controls.

However, the CaptoGlove is not a hand tracker–it’s a motion controller. That is, it doesn’t recreate your hands in VR, for example; it lets you essentially remap input controls, and in doing so, it enables the 10DoF, which comes quite naturally because it responds to your hand movement.
In the L4D demo, because the CaptoGlove was in this case mapped to the shooting controls, it’s not as if our hand was replicated in the VR environment. This is, then, not a camera-based uSens or Leap Motion hand tracker, nor a Finch VR-type hand controller, nor for that matter even quite like the tracked controllers for Rift and Vive. It was about the input, not so much about the hand tracking, in this particular demo.
However, the CaptoGlove’s capabilities can be expanded. You can add “CaptoSensors” for “more advanced positional tracking of arms and hands,” according to the Kickstarter page, and the CaptoGlove was accepted into the Vive Tracker program.

Read full article by Seth Colaner at: Tom’s Hardware