Microsoft files patent for a smart glove

Last year, Microsoft filed a patent for smart fabric products. It discussed a piece of cloth that has modern computer-based technology woven into it. Taking the idea ahead, the Redmond giant has filed a patent(published by USPTO) for a smart glove. Based on motion-restricting mechanisms, the electronically functional textile glove include one or more haptic output devices to provide vibrational outputs (via Patentlymobile).

The patented smart glove has regions of varying stiffness so that it can accommodate both the mounting of an input and output device and wearability. The glove also supports user-input devices such as a keyboard, mouse, touch screen, or game controller.

In some embodiments, the input subsystem may comprise or interface with selected natural user input (NUI) componentry. Such componentry may be integrated or peripheral, and the transduction and/or processing of input actions may be handled on- or off-board.

Example NUI componentry may include a microphone for speech and/or voice recognition; an infrared, color, stereoscopic, and/or depth camera for machine vision and/or gesture recognition; a head tracker, eye tracker, accelerometer, and/or gyroscope for motion detection and/or intent recognition; as well as electric-field sensing componentry for assessing brain activity.

It’s not just Microsoft who’s working on smart fabric technology. Companies like Apple, Google, Samsung are also working on similar technologies.