Wii Air Force: Will Gamer Gloves Help Fly Combat Jets?

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Wii Air Force: Will Gamer Gloves Help Fly Combat Jets?
By Spencer Ackerman
July 28, 2010 | 3:05 pm

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s band of futurists at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base think that pilots and flight engineers spend way too much time flipping switches and pressing buttons. In a recent pre-solicitation, the labs made it known they want enterprising engineers to design a pair of high-tech flight gloves that can help you fly a plane.

“Warfighter productivity is limited by the need to operate equipment via physical keys, switches, and buttons and to coordinate 3-D events viewed from different perspectives via time-consuming voice communications,” the labs lamented last week. The response? Link all the stuff necessary to flying a plane into a pair of gloves with gesture-recognition technology sewn in. Well, at least the stuff on cockpit annunciator panels.

“Pilots and mission crew need a means to annotate the real world out the cockpit or helicopter door with hand motions that become geo-registered icons on the displays of all air crew and ground team members simultaneously,” the labs urge. “All airmen need an ability to type commands, reports, etc. by simply moving their fingers in air.”

So, it may be a couple of years before you wave your hands like Luke on Dagobah and your F-22 takes off. But for the rest of what it takes to fly, just pull on the gloves, wave your hands around in a couple of specific ways to command the plane, and enjoy to your career in the Wii Air Force.

And that’s a natural thing. The labs don’t put it quite this way, but gesture recognition tech is the direction that gaming has been heading ever since the Wii taught everyone how to bowl virtually. According to one account of this year’s E3 Expo, PlayStation and Microsoft are pulling out all the stops to get their gaming consoles to recognize players’ gyrations and wobbles. In May, Gadgetlab reported that a pair of MIT researchers taught a computer to respond to commands transmitted through hand motions made in a pair of $1 lycra gloves aimed at a webcam.