The Mattel Powerglove was an accessory for the original NES game console. It is a virtual reality device which can send X, Y, Z, roll, and finger data. They can be found on Ebay for $20-40. An articlepublished in a 1990 BYTE Magazine showed how to interface the glove with a PC parallel port.

Since then, many different interfaces have been made, and much code has been floating around. My goal was to find the easiest interface to build for a modern computer, and write software which would function on a modern OS. I found all existing code to be either OS-dependent, broken, or written for the harder to build serial interface.

I built the orignal parallel interface featured in BYTE, and wrote a portable kernel module for Linux 2.4. It works fairly consistently for me, but I am looking for other people to test and report their experience. My email is lucidity(at)gmx.net for those interested.

A great homebrew VR book which got me started is The Virtual Reality Construction Kit. This project is indebted to the original Powerglove hackers and coders who provided invaluable assistance.

For more information, visit the original Project Page.