GlovePIE

GlovePIE
Information
Type	Input emulator
Developer	Carl Kenner
Operating System	Windows
License	Freeware
Supported Devices	Wii Remote, SIXAXIS, TrackIR, Kinect, Essential Reality P5 Glove, 5DT Data Glove, eMagin Z800 3D Visor, Polhemus, Intersense, Ascension and WorldViz trackers

GlovePIE is a software application that enables users to create custom input mappings for various control peripherals, such as game controllers, keyboards, and mice.

It stands for Glove Programmable Input Emulator. It was originally started as a system for emulating Joystick and Keyboard Input using the Essential Reality P5 Glove.

It was created by Carl Kenner.

GlovePIE runs on Microsoft Windows. Users type or load a short script that maps inputs from one device to emulated keyboard, mouse, joystick, MIDI or OSC output, so that a game or program can be controlled with hardware it does not support natively. Beyond the P5 glove, it supported professional virtual reality hardware such as the eMagin Z800 3D Visor HMD, Polhemus, Intersense and Ascension motion trackers and 5DT data gloves, and, from late 2006, the Nintendo Wii Remote.

Version 0.45 was released on 31 December 2011 as a free download. Kenner later stopped maintaining the program and the original website went offline; archived builds are kept in a community preservation repository on GitHub. No source code has been released.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked the version history, hardware support, license terms, preservation status and VR research uses against the archived glovepie.org and Kenner pages, the 0.45 readme, the GitHub preservation, decompilation and FreePIE repositories, Engadget, the Frontiers paper and the Virginia Tech dissertation. About review dates.

History

The copyright notice in the program's documentation covers the years 2004 to 2011. GlovePIE began as a tool for the Essential Reality P5, a consumer VR glove, and early versions added features such as finger gestures, palm orientations and support for multiple P5 gloves.

Version 0.21 added support for a range of professional VR hardware: the eMagin Z800 3D Visor head-mounted display, the 5DT DataGlove, Intersense trackers and wands, Ascension Flock of Birds, Polhemus Fastrak and IsoTrak II, and WorldViz PPT trackers. The changelog marks most of these as untested or partially tested. The same release reworked the graphical editor with auto-detect buttons. Kenner's download page, dated 3 December 2006, offered version 0.22, which added partial Wii Remote support along with support for NaturalPoint TrackIR, OptiTrack and SmartNav, FakeSpace Pinch Gloves and the Concept 2 PM3 rowing machine monitor. In a 2012 blog comment, Kenner wrote that he had released a working version of GlovePIE with Wii Remote support before the Wii's launch day in Australia, and that he bought a Wii Remote that day without owning a Wii.

Versions 0.23 to 0.29 extended Wii Remote support to multiple controllers, the infrared sensor bar, the Nunchuk and Classic Controller attachments and the controller's speaker. Version 0.30 added the PlayStation 3 SIXAXIS (over USB), the Xbox 360 controller (listed as untested), the Guitar Hero 3 guitar for Wii, the Novint Falcon haptic controller, the Vuzix iWear VR920 head-mounted display, the 3Dconnexion SpaceBall and TrackIR emulation. It also introduced an "Any" object that treats Wii Remotes, gamepads and SIXAXIS controllers alike. Engadget covered the 0.30 build in January 2008, noting its support for the SIXAXIS, the Xbox 360 pad and standard PC gamepads alongside Wii Remotes, and publishing example scripts for playing Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike and Portal with console controllers.

Version 0.40 added Wii MotionPlus support, gesture recognition for Wii Remotes, Nunchuks and SIXAXIS controllers, a working Wii Balance Board and automatic Wii Remote connection with the Microsoft Bluetooth stack. It removed VR920 and stereoscopic 3D support, and it was split into two builds, one with 5DT and Flock of Birds support and one with support for the Emotiv EPOC headset. Version 0.42, released on 14 January 2010, added untested support for the NeuroSky ThinkGear EEG headset and the Wild Divine Lightstone biometric device, and moved Emotiv support into a separate download after the Emotiv library triggered a false trojan warning in AVG antivirus. Version 0.43 followed on 23 January 2010 with fixes for Guitar Hero World Tour drum kit and DJ Hero turntable detection, manual Nunchuk calibration and better Unicode support.

The 0.45 release was declared officially free. It added Kinect support through Microsoft's Kinect for Windows Beta 2 SDK, which Kenner described as working but preliminary, and partial import of files from FAAST. The free build does not support the VR920, PlayStation Move, PlayStation Navigation controller, Emotiv EPOC, 5DT gloves or Flock of Birds, and it does not emulate Xbox 360 controllers. It requires Windows 2000 or later and DirectX 9; the readme directs users of older Windows versions to version 0.29.

The preservation repository also holds a build labeled 0.46. It is packaged with a developer note dated 4 January 2012 about the newer "Wii Remote Plus TR" hardware revision (which identifies itself to a computer as "RVL-CNT-01-TR"), which did not work with version 0.45; Kenner wrote that he had changed the program to use the new product ID and Bluetooth name but did not know whether that would be enough.

Version history

Version	Date	Selected changes
0.21	By 3 December 2006	eMagin Z800 3D Visor, 5DT DataGlove, Intersense, Ascension and Polhemus tracker and WorldViz PPT support; auto-detect in the editor
0.22	By 3 December 2006	Partial Wii Remote support; TrackIR, OptiTrack and SmartNav; FakeSpace Pinch Gloves; Concept 2 PM3
0.23		Multiple Wii Remotes; sensor bar infrared tracking
0.27 to 0.29		Nunchuk and Classic Controller support; Wii Remote speaker
0.30	By January 2008	SIXAXIS, Xbox 360 controller, Novint Falcon, Vuzix VR920, 3Dconnexion SpaceBall, TrackIR emulation, "Any" object
0.40		Wii MotionPlus, gesture recognition, Balance Board; VR920 and stereoscopic 3D support removed; separate Emotiv build
0.41		Emotiv EPOC fixes; always runs as administrator
0.42	14 January 2010	NeuroSky ThinkGear and Wild Divine Lightstone (untested); editor context menu
0.43	23 January 2010	Drum kit and turntable detection fixes; Nunchuk recalibration; Unicode improvements
0.45	31 December 2011	Officially free; Kinect support; partial FAAST import; Direct3D 9
0.46		Changes for the Wii Remote Plus TR (in the preservation repository)

How it works

GlovePIE has a script editor and a graphical editor. In the script editor, each line assigns an output to an expression built from inputs. The official site gave this example, which presses the W, A, S and D keys according to the position of a glove:

W = glove.z > -50 cm
S = glove.z < -70 cm
A = glove.x < -10 cm
D = glove.x > 10 cm

Scripts can use units such as centimetres, combine several devices, smooth values and play back key sequences as macros. The graphical editor can build a mapping by detection: the user performs the output action to emulate, then the input action that should trigger it. GlovePIE can also drive several independent mouse pointers from several mice.

Some output types depend on other software. Joystick emulation requires the PPJoy virtual joystick driver, MIDI input emulation requires MIDI Yoke, and speech recognition and synthesis require Microsoft SAPI 5.1 or later. The download is a folder with no installer: the user extracts it and runs the program.

VR and AR use

GlovePIE's name comes from its first target, the P5 glove. Kenner's instructions describe the P5 as having five bend sensors (one per finger), four buttons, and a receptor that tracks eight infrared LEDs on the glove to calculate its position and orientation. In GlovePIE each finger reports a value from 0 (straight) to 63 (bent).

Because GlovePIE read HMDs, data gloves and motion trackers, the official site presented it as a way to control any game or program with such devices through emulated input. Version 0.30 also added TrackIR emulation, which feeds head tracking data from other devices into games that support NaturalPoint's TrackIR. With version 0.45, Kenner wrote that the emulation could handle the newer encrypted TrackIR protocol in some games, such as DiRT 3, and described using a Kinect to look around naturally in driving games. In the same post he said that version 0.45 no longer contained any of the haiku text associated with the TrackIR interface, and accused NaturalPoint of using that text to stop other software from supplying the password its TrackIR interface expects.

Researchers have also used GlovePIE as a bridge between consumer controllers and VR systems. In a 2011 fNIRS brain-imaging study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Seraglia and colleagues at the University of Padua built a line-bisection task in an immersive virtual environment viewed through a modified V8 Research HMD with an Intersense tracker. Participants used a Wii Remote, which worked as a mouse through GlovePIE, to move a virtual laser-pointer dot. A 2010 Virginia Tech doctoral dissertation on interaction interoperability in distributed virtual environments named GlovePIE (together with ControllerMate for Mac) as a device emulator for connecting new input devices to legacy applications.

License

No GlovePIE source code was published. The 0.45 license, written by Kenner, prohibits use for any military purpose or on military bases or vessels, prohibits cheating in online or multiplayer games, and bars NaturalPoint from decompiling or studying the software. It also forbids export to or use in Israel until conditions the license sets out concerning Israeli occupation policy are met, and states that the program gives an error if run there; the version 0.40 changelog lists "improved copy protection" for this purpose. The military and Israel restrictions already appeared on Kenner's download page in December 2006.

Supported hardware

The official GlovePIE site listed the following supported hardware. Some items, including 5DT gloves and Flock of Birds, are not supported by the free 0.45 build.

• Nintendo Wii Remote (Wiimote)
• Sony Dual Shock 3 (except for Gyro) or Sony SIXAXIS
• NaturalPoint (Or eDimensional) TrackIR, OptiTrack, SmartNav
• FakeSpace Pinch Gloves (9600 baud by default, but can be changed)
• Concept 2 PM3 rowing machines (ergo or erg)
• All joysticks or gamepads recognized by Windows
• Parallel port gamepads (with PPJoy)
• All keyboards
• Mice with up to 5 buttons and 2 scroll wheels
• Most microphones
• Most MIDI input or output devices
• Essential Reality P5 Glove
• 5DT Data Glove (all versions)
• eMagin Z800 3D Visor HMD
• Polhemus trackers (must be set to 115200 baud): IsoTrak II, FasTrak, Liberty, Patriot, Liberty Latus
• Ascension trackers: Flock of Birds, MotionStar, etc.
• Intersense trackers: InterTrax, InertiaCube, IS-300, IS-600, IS-900, IS-1200, etc.
• WorldViz PPT trackers (all versions)
• GameTrak (only as a joystick, no direct support)

The changelogs also list devices that are not on this list, including the Xbox 360 controller, Wii MotionPlus, Wii Balance Board, Novint Falcon, Emotiv EPOC, NeuroSky ThinkGear and Microsoft Kinect.

Preservation and successors

The GlovePIE Preservation repository on GitHub hosts versions 0.28, 0.29, 0.40, 0.41, 0.42 (with and without Emotiv), 0.43, 0.45 and 0.46. Its maintainer states that they did not write the program and would remove the repository at Kenner's request. Because GlovePIE no longer receives updates and may eventually stop working with Windows updates, a companion decompilation project aims to reconstruct working source code. That project reports that GlovePIE was written in Pascal using Embarcadero Delphi.

FreePIE, an open-source program by Anders Malmgren released under the GPLv2 license, describes itself as "very similar to the popular utility GlovePIE, but encourages open development and integration with any device". It uses Python-based scripts and supports devices including the Wii Remote, TrackIR, Razer Hydra and Oculus Rift.