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DataGlove

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DataGlove
Basic Info
VR/AR Virtual Reality
Type Wired glove (input device)
Creator VPL Research
Developer Thomas Zimmerman, Jaron Lanier
Release Date 1987
System
Storage
Display
Image
Optics
Tracking
Audio
Connectivity
Device
Sensors Fiber-optic flex sensors; Polhemus magnetic position tracker

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The DataGlove (also written Data Glove and often called the VPL DataGlove) was a wired glove input device for virtual reality commercialized by VPL Research in 1987.[1][2] It is widely regarded as the first commercial glove-based controller for virtual environments. The device was based on an optical finger-bend sensor invented by Thomas Zimmerman and was developed at VPL by a team that included Zimmerman, Jaron Lanier and others. Worn on the hand, the glove measured the flexion of the wearer's fingers using fiber-optic sensors and reported the position and orientation of the hand using a separate magnetic tracker, letting a user reach into and manipulate a computer-generated three-dimensional scene.[1][3]

The DataGlove was one of the defining components of the early VR systems sold by VPL Research, alongside the company's EyePhone head-mounted display. It was used in research settings including the NASA Ames Research Center, and its commercial visibility grew after it appeared on the cover of Scientific American in October 1987.[2][4] Its best-known cultural legacy is the Mattel Power Glove, a low-cost consumer derivative released in 1989 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.[5]

Background and invention

The DataGlove grew out of work by Thomas G. Zimmerman, who in the early 1980s devised a way to measure how much a finger bends using light carried in a flexible tube. On September 29, 1982, Zimmerman filed a United States patent application for an "optical flex sensor," which was issued as US Patent 4,542,291 on September 17, 1985.[6] The sensor used a flexible light guide with a light source at one end and a photosensitive detector at the other; bending the guide changed the amount of light reaching the detector, so the electrical output of the detector corresponded to the bend angle. The patent specifically described mounting such sensors in garments such as gloves or body suits to track the motion of joints and limbs.[6]

Zimmerman developed his finger-bend sensor in the early 1980s and went on to work with Jaron Lanier to turn it into a hand-tracking glove.[7][8] Lanier founded VPL Research, which became the first business to sell head-mounted displays and wired gloves commercially, and Zimmerman joined as a member of its research and development team.[9] Lanier, who led VPL, is widely credited with popularizing the term "virtual reality" during this period.[7] At VPL the original single-finger concept was expanded into a full hand-tracking glove. The fiber-optic flex sensor used in the production DataGlove was refined by VPL team member Young L. Harvill, who scratched or treated each optical fiber near a finger joint so that light escaped where the finger bent, making the fiber locally sensitive to flexion.[10]

The combined system was described publicly in a 1987 technical paper, "A hand gesture interface device," presented at the joint SIGCHI and Graphics Interface conference (CHI + GI 87) held in Toronto in April 1987. Its authors, Thomas Zimmerman, Jaron Lanier, Chuck Blanchard, Steve Bryson and Young Harvill, were all affiliated with VPL Research.[3] The paper reported a hand-to-machine interface that supplied real-time gesture, position and orientation data: analog flex sensors on the glove measured finger bending, hand position and orientation were obtained either by ultrasonics (giving five degrees of freedom) or by magnetic flux sensors (giving six degrees of freedom), and piezoceramic benders could provide the wearer with tactile feedback.[3]

Technology

The DataGlove was built around a lightweight cloth glove instrumented with flexible optical fibers that ran along the back of the hand and over the finger joints.[1][10] Each fiber carried light from a small light source, such as a light-emitting diode, to a phototransistor at the opposite end. Because the fibers were treated where they crossed the knuckles so that light leaked out as the joint bent, the amount of light reaching each phototransistor dropped in proportion to how far the finger was flexed. The phototransistor signals were converted to digital values, giving a continuous measurement of finger flexion that could be read by a host computer.[10][1]

Finger sensing alone could not tell the computer where the hand was in space, so the DataGlove was paired with a separate six-degrees-of-freedom electromagnetic tracker made by Polhemus. The tracker reported the position and orientation (including yaw, pitch and roll) of the hand, while the optical sensors reported the bend of the fingers.[1][3] Together these two subsystems let software reconstruct a posed model of the user's hand in real time, so that the wearer could point, grasp and gesture inside a virtual scene.[3][1]

Use in early virtual reality systems

At VPL the DataGlove was sold as the hand-input element of the company's virtual reality hardware, used together with the EyePhone head-mounted display so that a user wearing both could look around a synthetic environment and reach into it with a tracked virtual hand.[9][1] In 1989 VPL packaged these components into "Reality Built for Two" (RB2), promoted as the first commercial networked virtual reality system, which combined the EyePhone, the DataGlove and (optionally) a full-body DataSuit with graphics workstations and VPL's own software.[11][9] A complete VPL system of this kind, including the computers required to drive it, cost on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars, which limited the technology to research laboratories, universities and corporate users rather than consumers.[9][12]

One prominent user was the NASA Ames Research Center, whose Virtual Interface Environment Workstation (VIEW) laboratory used DataGloves custom-built by Zimmerman at VPL as the hand-input device for its virtual environment workstation.[4][13] The glove let NASA operators handle virtual objects directly and was also studied for teleoperation, including experiments that used a DataGlove to control a robotic hand.[13][14]

Influence and the Power Glove

Although the professional DataGlove was far too expensive for the mass market, its technology directly inspired a consumer product. VPL licensed glove technology that was adapted into the Mattel Power Glove, released in 1989 as a controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System.[5][9] The Power Glove was a deliberately low-cost reworking of the DataGlove idea, designed for Abrams/Gentile Entertainment and manufactured by Mattel in the United States (and by PAX in Japan); both Zimmerman and Lanier are credited among the people whose work fed into it.[5] To hit a consumer price point, the Power Glove replaced the DataGlove's fiber-optic sensors with much cheaper flex sensors made from conductive ink printed on plastic, and it used ultrasonic transmitters rather than a magnetic tracker to estimate the hand's position.[5] The result measured finger bending and hand position only coarsely compared with the DataGlove, but it sold around a million units, making it the first widely sold glove controller and the public's earliest hands-on contact with VR-style input.[5][9]

It is important to distinguish the two devices. The VPL DataGlove of 1987 was a precise, fiber-optic, research-grade instrument used in laboratories and high-end VR systems, while the Mattel Power Glove of 1989 was an inexpensive consumer game accessory derived from the same basic concept but built with cheaper sensing methods.[1][5]

VPL Research itself did not last long after its peak. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1990, and its virtual reality and graphics patents, including those underpinning the DataGlove, were later acquired by Sun Microsystems.[9] The DataGlove nonetheless remains a landmark in the history of input devices: it established the wired glove as a serious interface for virtual reality and set a pattern, fingers sensed by per-joint flex sensors plus a separate spatial tracker, that later glove controllers continued to follow.[1][10]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 "VPL DataGlove". Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/technology/VPL-DataGlove. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Zimmerman and Lanier Develop the DataGlove, a Hand Gesture Interface Device". HistoryofInformation.com. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3626. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 "A hand gesture interface device". ACM (Proceedings of the SIGCHI/GI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and Graphics Interface, 1987). 1987. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/29933.275628. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "A New Continent of Ideas". NASA Spinoff. https://spinoff.nasa.gov/node/9017. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 "Power Glove". Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "US4542291A - Optical flex sensor". Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US4542291A/en. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Who Coined the Term Virtual Reality?". Virtual Reality Society. https://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality/who-coined-the-term.html. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  8. ↑ "Thomas G. Zimmerman". Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_G._Zimmerman. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 "VPL Research". Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 "Wired glove". Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wired_glove. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  11. ↑ "Reality Built for Two: A Virtual Reality Tool". ACM (Proceedings of the 1990 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics). 1990. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/91394.91409. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  12. ↑ "Jaron Lanier's EyePhone: Head And Glove Virtual Reality In The 1980s". Flashbak. https://flashbak.com/jaron-laniers-eyephone-head-and-glove-virtual-reality-in-the-1980s-26180/. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 "NASA VIEWlab". Immersive Archive (USC). https://immersivearchive.org/nasa-viewlab.html. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
  14. ↑ "Teleoperation Experiments with a Utah/MIT Hand and a VPL DataGlove". NASA Technical Reports Server. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19900020567/downloads/19900020567.pdf. Retrieved June 28, 2026.
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