I am quite new into the electronic realm, so forgive my lack of proper terminology.
I am planning to build a simple device, that I will be use to manipulate a mesh on my computer. when I move the device, the mesh rotate/translate. As example, you can use one of these artist doll/mannequin used in art class, or just a hand; the concept is applicable to various uses.
For sake of clarity, let's use a human hand/glove.
So, I was looking into it, and found that I need to use a gyro (which records the rotation among the 3 axis), and an accelerometer (which would give me the variation in position, altho some says that it tells me the axis orientation relative to the ground, thanks to the gravity field).
Now, if you want to make a glove, you would end up with one gyro on the back of the hand (the hand always rotate as whole on the wrist axis), and 5 accelerometer, one per finger.
Is there another technique to have the same result, but without this waste of sensors? I've seen electric strips, which are basically variable resistors that change their value as they get curved in one direction, but the price is close to a sensor, and they offer very unstable signals, which would require a lot of compensation via software.
is there any other way, other than use a camera or the aforementioned gyro + accelerometer; to monitor the variation of position of an object? In the case of the hand, you would be interested only in variation from the starting point (say you want to make an animation of a hand that open and close), I can't really find a way to do it unless I use all these sensors.
Any help is more than welcome…I don't even know what to look for, to be honest, so I rely on your expertise. Thanks in advance.
Best Answer
Building a "power glove" or a video tracking system from scratch is definitely not a project for a beginner.
However, there are many commercial devices out there for fairly reasonable prices — mainly aimed at video game users — and your best bet would be to acquire one of them and learn how to work with it in software.
One particularly good example is the Xbox Kinect. There is a software library that allows an application developer to access most of the features and capabilities of this 3D video sensor, including sensing the position and pose (e.g., hand position) of one or more human beings.
After you have your software application working at some level, you can revisit the question of building (or buying) a better user interface for it. At that point, you'll have a much better idea of what you really need in terms of the technical details.