Envision a colleague positioning papers on a digital bulletin board — but without actually touching anything. The co-worker wears a glove and, by merely raising and moving her hand, arranges radiant video images that appear on a transparent screen before her. She points left, and an image slides that way; she pulls her hand toward her, and an image enlarges, as if she had applied a zoom function. While this seems like a scene straight out of the 2002 Tom Cruise blockbuster Minority Report, it isn’t. The technology is known as “human-machine interface,” and it’s real.
In December 2015, engineers at the Polytechnic University of Turin and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology introduced “GoldFinger,” a prototype glove that converts the mechanical movements of a person’s fingers and hands into electrical power. (The invention’s name is not related to the titular villain of the 1964 James Bond film.) With a motion as small as opening and closing a loose fist, the wearer creates an electrical charge that accumulates in GoldFinger’s nylon fabric; the resulting energy runs through metallic wires sewn into the glove to power LED lights on a fingertip. The user can use gestures to control interactive displays that respond to the lights, potentially from several feet away.
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