Power glove

Power Glove
Basic Info
VR/AR	Virtual Reality
Type	Motion-sensing controller
Subtype	Wired glove for the Nintendo Entertainment System
Platform	Nintendo Entertainment System
Creator	Abrams/Gentile Entertainment
Developer	Abrams/Gentile Entertainment (based on VPL Research DataGlove)
Manufacturer	Mattel (North America), PAX (Japan)
Announcement Date	January 1989 (Consumer Electronics Show)
Release Date	October 1989 (North America)
Price	US$75-100
Versions	North American (Mattel), Japanese (PAX)
Requires	Nintendo Entertainment System, television-mounted ultrasonic sensor bar
Predecessor	VPL DataGlove
System
Storage
Display
Display	N/A
Resolution	N/A
Refresh Rate	N/A
Image
Field of View	N/A
Optics
Optics	N/A
Passthrough	N/A
Tracking
Tracking	Ultrasonic position tracking (triangulation); resistive-ink flex sensors on the fingers
Eye Tracking	N/A
Face Tracking	N/A
Hand Tracking	Finger flex (roll axis), 2 bits per finger
Body Tracking	N/A
Rotational Tracking	Roll only
Positional Tracking	Yes (ultrasonic X/Y/Z)
Audio
Audio	N/A
Microphone	N/A
Camera	N/A
Connectivity
Connectivity	Wired (NES controller port)
Power	Drawn from the NES; sensors powered through the console
Device
Material	Molded plastic forearm guard with fabric glove
Haptics	N/A
Color	Grey and black
Sensors	Ultrasonic transmitters (glove) and receivers (sensor bar), resistive-ink flex sensors, onboard microprocessor
Input	Directional pad, A/B, Start/Select, Program button, numbered buttons 0-9

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The Power Glove is a motion-sensing controller accessory for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), released by Mattel in North America in October 1989 and by PAX in Japan. It is a consumer adaptation of the VPL Research DataGlove, the wired glove developed for Virtual Reality research by Jaron Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman, re-engineered to reach a toy-store price point. It translates hand position and finger bending into on-screen input using ultrasonic position tracking and resistive-ink flex sensors, and it carries a conventional set of NES buttons on its forearm guard so it can also be used as a standard controller.

The glove was designed by Grant Goddard and Samuel Cooper Davis at Abrams/Gentile Entertainment (AGE), the marketing firm that licensed VPL's glove technology and brought it to Mattel and Nintendo; Mattel separately brought in Hal Berger and Gary Yamron of Image Design and Marketing to turn the technology into a finished product. Although it sold close to one million units, it is widely cited as a commercial failure: its controls were imprecise and hard to calibrate, only two games were built specifically for it, and it remained on retail shelves for less than a year before being discontinued in 1990. Despite that, the Power Glove became a cult object and the most widely recognized early consumer attempt at glove-based gesture input, a lineage that runs through later hand-tracking and motion controllers.

Origins in the VPL DataGlove

The Power Glove descends directly from research-grade VR hardware. Zimmerman filed a patent in 1982 for a glove fitted with optical flex sensors that measured finger bending (US Patent 4,542,291). He and Jaron Lanier founded VPL Research in the mid-1980s and built the DataGlove, combining analog flex sensors with hand-position tracking; the company described the device in the 1987 paper "A hand gesture interface device," presented at the CHI+GI conference by Zimmerman, Lanier, Chuck Blanchard, Steve Bryson and Young Harvill. A later VPL patent covering the input method, US Patent 4,988,981 ("Computer data entry and manipulation apparatus and method"), was filed on February 28, 1989 by Zimmerman and Lanier and granted on January 29, 1991. The DataGlove was a niche scientific instrument sold for thousands of dollars and used by clients such as NASA; a figure of around US$10,000 per unit is commonly cited.

In late 1988, AGE set out to convert that technology into a mass-market toy. The firm, founded by Marty Abrams and brothers John and Chris Gentile, had previously brokered licensed toy products and saw the glove as a consumer gaming peripheral. AGE demonstrated a DataGlove-based prototype to Mattel, which agreed to develop and manufacture the product, while Mattel and AGE secured Nintendo's approval and Seal of Quality for the NES. The accessory was officially licensed, but Nintendo itself did not design or develop it.

How it works

The Power Glove tracks the hand in two ways. An L-shaped bar mounted around the television carries ultrasonic receivers, and the glove's forearm guard carries ultrasonic transmitters. By timing the sound pulses between the transmitters and receivers, the system triangulates the hand's position in three dimensions in front of the screen. AGE's design called for three transmitter-receiver pairs to resolve full position, but cost and size constraints reduced the shipped product to two, limiting accuracy.

Finger bending is read by flex sensors running along the fingers. Where Zimmerman's original DataGlove used optical fibers, the Power Glove used strips printed with electrically resistive (conductive) ink that changed resistance as a finger bent, a change that cut the sensor cost to a few cents apiece. The consumer sensors were coarse: each finger reported only about 2 bits of flex (roughly four positions), and the glove detected hand roll rather than the full yaw, pitch and roll of the research device. All of this was handled by a microprocessor in the arm guard, which connected to the console through the NES controller port.

To make the glove usable with software that was never written for it, the forearm guard included a full set of standard NES inputs: a directional pad, A and B buttons, Start and Select, a Program button, and a keypad of buttons numbered 0 through 9. Players entered numeric codes to load preset control profiles for individual games, and the buttons let the glove fall back to ordinary controller behavior.

Power Glove compared with the VPL DataGlove

Feature	VPL DataGlove	Mattel Power Glove
Flex sensor	Optical fiber	Resistive ink strip
Finger resolution	About 8 bits (256 positions) per finger	About 2 bits (4 positions) per finger
Hand orientation	Yaw, pitch and roll	Roll only
Position tracking	Magnetic or ultrasonic	Ultrasonic triangulation (2 sensors shipped)
Approximate price	Thousands of US dollars	US$75-100
Intended market	VR and scientific research	NES video game players

Launch and games

AGE showed the glove at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1989, and large retail pre-orders were reported, including six-figure commitments from chains such as Toys "R" Us and Kmart. The Power Glove went on sale in North America in October 1989 at a price generally reported between US$75 and US$100. Inverse reported that the glove grossed about US$88 million during its short retail life.

Only two games were built specifically for the Power Glove. Super Glove Ball, a first-person puzzle game in which the player swats a ball through chambers, was the closest thing to a showcase title, and Bad Street Brawler, a side-scrolling beat 'em up, was given Power Glove control support. Several other titles, including Glove Pilot, Manipulator Glove Adventure and a game variously called Tech Town or Tektown, were announced but never released. Because the glove shipped without a pack-in game and most NES titles were not designed for gesture control, it had little software to demonstrate its capabilities.

Reception and commercial failure

The Power Glove sold strongly at first, with sales generally reported at close to one million units, but its reputation collapsed quickly. Reviewers and players found the controls imprecise and the ultrasonic tracking difficult to calibrate; the oral history compiled by Mental Floss describes calibration steps that many children could not perform reliably and arm fatigue that limited comfortable play to short sessions. With only two dedicated games and unreliable behavior on existing titles, the glove was widely judged impractical, and Mattel discontinued it in 1990. VPL Research, the company behind the underlying glove technology, filed for bankruptcy in 1990, and its patents later passed to Sun Microsystems.

The device is closely tied to the 1989 Universal Pictures film The Wizard, a feature-length production that doubled as promotion for Nintendo hardware and prominently featured the Power Glove; the line "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad," delivered by the character Lucas, became its best-known cultural reference. The glove later appeared in the 1991 horror film Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, reinforcing its status as a period icon.

Legacy and cult status

Although it failed as a game controller, the Power Glove found a long second life. Because it was an inexpensive, mass-produced motion-and-flex input device, hobbyists, artists and researchers repurposed it long after Mattel stopped selling it. In the 1990s, members of the homebrew VR community used the glove as a cheap hand input for early virtual reality rigs, and makers have continued to wire it to microcontrollers and rebuild it as a hand-tracking interface for VR demos. The Chicago chiptune band I Fight Dragons modified Power Gloves into stage instruments, programming musical notes onto the gloves and performing with them for about two years.

The Power Glove is usually described as a precursor to later motion and gesture input. Commentators link it to gesture-based gaming controllers such as the Nintendo Wii and to VR hand controllers including Oculus Touch, framing all of them as descendants of the same idea that the hand itself could be the interface. The wider attempt it represents, putting an instrumented glove on a consumer's hand, is the same approach pursued by later VR gloves such as the Gloveone and Manus VR products, and by optical hand-tracking systems like Leap Motion and the hand tracking built into modern headsets. The glove's history was documented in The Power of Glove (2019), a feature documentary directed by Andrew Austin and Adam Ward that traces its development and afterlife.

See also

• VPL Research
• Jaron Lanier
• Data glove
• Hand tracking
• Gloveone
• Manus VR
• Input Devices
• Virtual Boy