P5 Glove

What is the P5 Glove?

the P5 Glove is an old virtual reality glove (circa 2002). it consists of a wired glove that you strap on your right hand, and a tower that reads the position of the glove. the glove has bend sensors, and is also supposed to transmit roll, pitch, and yaw information.

i had never heard of one of these until i saw it in the junk box at NYCResistor a few months ago. the guys there had no idea what it was, but i did a little research, figured out what it was, and fell in love with the idea of getting that cheesily futuristic gadget to do something cool.

What is the crazy lady trying to do with a P5 Glove?

i'm still in the early stages of this project. in other words, before i can get it to do anything cool, i need to have some kind of driver for it. Essential Reality made drivers for windows and linux back in the day, but they've long since disappeared, and my efforts to find the factory drivers have come to naught.

i have found several websites so far that i'm reading through and culling what information i can. it's a slow process because i'm an inexperienced programmer with no experience whatsoever in interacting with I/O Devices.

General P5 Information

• Robot Group page on the P5 Glove
• Simulus page on the P5 Glove, focuses on musical applications of it.
• P5 Glove wiki
• P5 Glove yahoo group

P5 Code That May Work With Linux

• P5 Glove links, including a link to libp5glove, linux libraries to interface with the glove. (i still haven't been able to get these libraries to install on either of my computers, though.)
• Noisybox page on using the P5 Glove with puredata -- see also the pure data tutorial.
• Java interface for the P5 Glove
• p5 drivers--a site that has the original drivers and software development kit mirrored. they do not appear to work with kernel 2.6.24-23-generic, though, and the drivers are binary [closed-source].

Windows Programs for the P5

• p5midi: a program that interfaces the p5 with midi. i haven't got the chance to play with it...from the website it appears to be a windows program, though, so my only hope to make this useful would be if it doesn't run wonkily over wine.
• gestural music interface: music-making program for the p5; also appears to be a windows application

Linux Device Driver Resources

• Linux Device Drivers: not P5 Glove specific, but it covers the more general topic of writing device drivers for linux.
• USB sniffing in linux
• Gizmo Daemon

So, is the glove working yet?

not yet. i tried running the original driver, and it doesn't run on my box--and, i can't even see the code to begin to know what to tweak, since it's a binary. since i also can't get libp5glove installed on my computer, it's looking like i'm going to have to write my own driver for it. this involves learning device driver programming. being able to do device driver programming requires knowing C.

hence, i'm in the process of learning C, specifically so i can get this glove to work on my computer.