Nintendo NES Power Glove + Arduino + Unity = Win.

I stumbled accross this amazing video / instructables tutorial set a few weeks back but only just had time to sit down and write about it. If you’re not a ludicrous NES fan like myself then perhaps this won’t be AS exciting as it was when I found it, but hey here goes anyway!

Many people have enjoyed experimenting with external devices to control Unity, the most prominent in this context being Darwiin remote (or PC equivalent) which has been used alongside the plugin on the wiki in order to use the Wiimote in conjunction with Unity.

So imagine my amazement when I came across someone who had managed to get a Nintendo Power Glove to do the same thing. Oh wait, you don’t recall the PowerGlove? oh dear, well lets get you up to speed as frankly it wasn’t the most succesful peripheral at the time..

The Power Glove was developed by Abrams Gentile Entertainment and Mattel and licensed by Nintendo in 1989 for the NES – a good four years into its tenure in our living rooms. It didn’t really do a whole lot but ostensibly was an early wii-like sign from Ninty that said they were willing to experiment with their products, and take the controller away from simply button bashing.

Placing buttons in the fingertips, and mimicking human movements inside the back of hand unit, the glove controlled games using gestures, but ultimately was highly innacurate, and was mostly ignored and mocked for its poor quality responses.

Fastforward to the glove’s 20th Anniversary, and a ludicrously intelligent chap called Matt Mechtley (who also develops those awesome games at Blurst.com over at Flashbang studios) has decided to take the power glove apart and combine it with arduino – a small interface technology you can look up here – in order to control games in software such as Unity. In his demo he finishes by controlling a simple primitive in Unity, and frankly it is astonishing what he has achieved with a few modifications via Arduino.

Here is Matt’s video ‘tutorial’ (in quotations there not negatively but simply as he doesn’t have time to explain each step) -

and here is a link to the Instructables.com page with more detail, epic props to you Matt!

http://www.instructables.com/id/Power-Glove-20th-Anniversary-Edition/