Review by Radek Michalik for Essential Reality P5 Gaming Glove
Rating:
When I bought this, I made a deal with myself: I know that since it went off the market, it can’t be an incredible product, so if I buy it, I shouldn’t blame myself if I spent $20 on something I may never use again. Making this deal was worth it.

The glove is an interesting device. It fits your hand very well and everything is pretty well thought-out (finger movements, certain clicking combinations, etc.) The problem is in the execution. You need to keep your hand within a certain distance from the receiver, or the signal gets messy and the mouse pointer on the screen starts going nuts. Think of it as a mouse pad in the air. You move off the mouse pad, and the signal becomes erratic. Problem is, with the real mousepad, you can see its boundaries. With this “invisible pad”, you can’t, and find yourself straying off to the sides or top or bottom quite a lot. I suppose with a lot more practice, I could become as proficient at it as I am with the mouse, but since I’ve had many years of practice with the mouse… I’ll stick to that, and use the glove if I feel wacky.

Conclusion: Its original going price of over $100 was ridiculous. For $20, it’s a fun little toy that you may be able to make use of. Or maybe not. Just don’t expect to be able to do magic with it right out of the box.

Review by Robert Beardain for Essential Reality P5 Gaming Glove
Rating:
Yes, the P5 out of the box has its shortcommings. It is eratic on all 6 degrees of freedom and not very usefull with games or any software for that matter. I have honestly never got the thumb bend sensor to work. The thumb sensor wouldn’t be all that usefull anyways due to the fact that the thumb is 3d and not 2d so you would need 2 bend sensors. Oh, the finger sensors are not based on fiber optics but a technique that detects deformation of a metal strip. The “0,0,0″ position is the center of the base station. The FPS, ie update rate, of the glove is only around 15-30 FPS…but look at what they have in the “high tech” labs. There rates are down around 5-7 FPS back when the P5 came out.

GOOD NEWS!!!

The P5 drivers have been open sourced. Not usefull for the average user but there are people out there, like myself, that are making changes to the code. Simply download the latest driver from the group shown below and replace the existing and your good to go.

These changes add filters to the 6 degrees of freedom to prevent the jitters. The changes also prevent the random mouse movement when outside the “mouse pad.” There is also a program called Programmable Input Emulator (P.I.E.) that allows you to map movements to actions. This allows you to bind your pointer finger to the key that fires your gun… PIE allows you to bind almost any periferal to any other. ie, Link the up arrow to scroll the mouse up. Macros are also handled…wave your hand and have a complex move be performed automaticaly. Also in PIE is Voice to Action and Text to Speech.

This and more info is available free at the yahoo group “P5GLOVE”.

The P5 might not be sold in stores anymore but it is far from dead.

…Oh, Don’t buy a Nostromo N50…get a Nostromo N52…much better for games