A Low-cost Data Glove for Virtual Reality

Data gloves are devices with a set of sensors for obtaining information about the movement of the hand and its fingers. In Virtual Reality, data gloves are widely used as input devices for its capability to interact with the computer for application development. Currently, there are many such devices, which are offered by specialized commercial companies at high costs. Nevertheless, in recent years low-cost solutions for construction and software development kits for data gloves have been available. This paper presents the design and development of a low-cost data glove system to be used in virtual reality applications based on finger movements. The design of the glove is presented as a prototype based on computer vision algorithms in order to determine the relative position of the fingers. The manufactured data glove requires only inexpensive materials and a simple webcam for motion tracking. In the performed tests, our solution shows good results in the task of tracking the movement of each finger in a 3D space.