Say what you want about the Nintendo Power Glove. Sure, it was terribly inaccurate. Sure, it had awful controls. But hey, if you were rocking one of these in 1989, you were riding the wave of the future. Now, one clever man has used a Power Glove to show off a capability that truly is futuristic: gestural drone control.
Nolan Moore took the nearly three-decade old video game accessory and gutted it. After removing the internals, he designed two new circuit boards that still took input from the old controls (a nice nostalgic touch) and added a Teensy LC microcontroller board that reads data from an inertial measurement unit (IMU, the same device that helps planes navigate) and flex sensors on the fingers and then passes the data onto a controller that communicates with his Parrot AR.Drone 2.0.
The result is a drone that can be controlled in a very intuitive way, using gestures like a flat palm to hover and pointing up or down to adjust altitude. Check out the video above to see it in action. It's obviously a proof of concept and thus still a bit rough around the edges, but the idea is promising. I'd be very interested in such a system in the future, as it could vastly simplify the process of learning to fly a drone.
