Imagine you’re walking around in the parking lot of a large mall and discover you can’t remember where you parked your car. No problem, all you need to do is pull a glove out of your pocket or purse and then make your way to your car by means of vibrations in different parts of the glove that lead the way. This is no fantasy, engineers in Helsinki have devises just such a glove Mail Online reports, and ready making it ready for consumers. Gizmag says such a glove could be used in innumerable situations, from finding grocery store items to lost keys.
It’s possible, Online says, that someday soon, we’ll all be wearing a vibrating glove, or one something like it, pretty much all the time. The glove could lead us while driving, golfing or walking across a university campus looking for a classroom. All the wearer need do, is pay attention to the slight vibrations from the glove that act as sort of a compass, with the vibrations occurring in the glove at the same points as degrees, all with far less accuracy needed to find what is being looked for.
The gloves have been designed by scientists working at the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Helsinki Finland, and are chock full of sensors. After all in order to lead a person to a target, the glove must be able to communicate with the rest of the world. And it has to be able to do that in two ways, Gizmag explains. The first is by understanding where it is relative to everything else. The second is be obtaining information about the location of the desired target. The first is easy of course, all that takes is adding GPS receiver. Figuring out what to look for is a lot more challenging, and that’s why it’s done using the brains embedded in a smartphone. To find what they are looking for, a person brings up a smartphone app that has preprogrammed objects on it, with information residing either directly on the smartphone (the address of a building, for example) or on another site, such as server that holds all the location data of items in a supermarket. Next, the glove needs a means of locating targets that are too close to be measured by GPS coordinates, and that’s where Near Field Radio Communications comes in. In short, it’s a tiny radio transmitter and receiving device. In such a scenario, store personnel would program a tag on an item for sale, such as a shirt; that tag would then send out a signal telling other nearby devices where it is. The glove would then figure out which signal to listen to and then start vibrating the fingers of the glove letting the wearer know which way to go.
Unfortunately, the glove is still under development, but a working model has been built and tested, and reps for the group say they expect the glove to be made for sale in as little as a year.
