P5 Glove Developments

Composing with a mouse is often like trying to do caligraphy with a brick!
-- Andrew Garton on CEC Discuss, 1999

Page last updated: August 11, 2010. by Ross Bencina

Simulus is developing interface systems for musical performance using the P5 virtual reality glove made by Essential Reality. Although our primary goal is to explore the musical potential of these devices and incorporate them into our performances, this page is mainly concerned with our related technical activities. If you're interested in the music we have made in the past (without the gloves) there are some excerpts on our home page.

What We're Up To

The manufacturer supplied P5 software development kit (SDK) is only supported on Windows and Linux. This kit does not support "absolute mode" spatial tracking, nor is a Macintosh version available. Due to the limitations of the manufacturer supplied SDK, and our requirement for operation on Windows and Macintosh, we are bypassing the manufacturer's SDK and have developed our own software. Luckily this job has been made easier by the existence of an open source Linux glove library developed by Jason McMullan (libp5glove). At present we have a preliminary version of this code running on Windows XP and MacOS-X. We intend to extend support to multiple gloves simultaneously connected to a single computer, and to improve the quality of spatial tracking.

We are primarily interested in interfacing with existing computer music software such as SuperCollider, Max/MSP, Reaktor, and AudioMulch. For this purpose we are working with the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol over UDP/IP. OSC allows us to integrate with many existing computer music environments, and to easily develop new musical mappings within OSC compatible software.

We have developed software applications for Windows and MacOS-X.

Open Questions

• The spatial data that comes out of the glove is warped. Jason's code may not convert LED positions to X/Y/Z and Roll/Pitch/Yaw as accurately as the manufacturers code. We may need to investigate/improve this. Progress made: the latest version of the library includes un-warping code.
• Do the gloves have serial numbers that can be queried via usb? We'd like to support multiple gloves, and identify them by unique identifier if possible.
• We have heard that multiple gloves may optically interfere with each other. We need to assess and document this because we intend to run at least three gloves at a time.
• We need to work out the numbering system used for the LED, and the geometry of the glove
• A full TODO development list is in the libp5glove SVN repository listed below

Results

P5 Glove MIDI

P5 Glove MIDI (April 21 2004) for Windows by Ross Bencina converts P5 glove data into MIDI. This is a bit like Nicholas Fournel's P5Midi application except the MIDI codes are hardwired, and the spatial data uses absolute mode.

P5osc

P5osc (December 4 2006) Universal Binary for Mac OSX (PPC and Intel) by Tim Kreger converts glove data into OSC (Open Sound Control) messages.

Older version of P5osc (April 28 2004) for Mac OSX (PPC only).

Source code for p5osc is available from a Subversion repository at googlecode:

libp5glove

We have contributed to Jason McMullan's libp5glove by porting it to Windows and Mac OS X. The Windows port was done by Ross Bencina with the help of Alan Macek's Windows USB source code. Note that this port uses the built-in Windows HID driver and does not require any special drivers to be installed. The Mac OSX version was done by Tim Kreger and involved the development of a driver. libp5glove is distributed under the GNU LGPL license.

Source code for our version of libp5glove is available from a Subversion repository at googlecode:

Older Windows libp5glove Executables

The latest source code for libp5glove is available from the SVN repository referenced above. An older version with Windows executables is provided here for historical reasons. The zip file includes p5dump.exe and p5hand.exe. A recent version which includes code to transform glove coordinates to linear 3-space: libp5glove-0.2-win32-2004-02-26.zip (321k) An older version without matrix: libp5glove-0.2-win32-2004-02-20.zip.

Links and Resources

P5 Yahoo Group

Last time we checked, the forums on the manufacturer's web site were no longer accepting new members. We have started the P5 Glove Yahoo! group in order to provide a forum for people using and developing for the P5 glove.

Other P5 Musical Applications

• Nicolas Fournel has written a program for Windows called P5midi which converts P5 glove data into MIDI messages.
• Trash80 (Timothy Lamb) has been controlling Reaktor with the P5 glove using Nicolas Fournel's P5midi software. Timothy has made some interesting hardware modifications to his glove to support full 360 degree optical tracking.
• Joshua Benjamin's Gestural Music Interface is a control interface to manipulate real-time musical signals in a 3D virtual space, based on the P5's characteristics and finger bending.
• Hugo Desmeules' Pd (Pure Data) patches for the P5 glove make use of the P5 MIDI programs linked on this page.
• Jason Plumb has the P5 glove working with Pd (Pure Data) on Linux using an OSC program which he wrote.
• ... should your link be here? If so, please let rossb@audiomulch.com know.

Glove based sound, music and gesture

• Michael Waisvisz from STEIM, The Hands and The Hands II

• Laetitia Sonami, The Lady's Glove
• Eric Singer's wireless MIDI glove projects.
• Hypersense make music with finger flex based gestural controllers
• Fels, S. S. and Hinton, G. E. (1992) Glove-Talk: A neural network interface between a data-glove and a speech synthesizer. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 3, No 6
• Fels, S. S. and Hinton, G. E. (1995) Glove-Talk II: A Neural Network Interface Which Maps Gestures to Parallel Formant Speech Synthesizer Controls. CHI95
• Device based approaches to sign language recognition
• Axel Mulder has written some interesting stuff about glove controllers including: Virtual Musical Instruments: Accessing the Sound Synthesis Universe as a Performer (1994), and Design of Virtual 3D Instruments for Musical Interaction (1998)
• Roel Vertegaal's An evaluation of input devices for timbre space navigation
• David J. Sturman and David Zeltzer, A Survey of Glove-based Input, Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE ,Volume: 14 , Issue: 1 , Jan. 1994 Pages:30 - 39
• James Mandelis' glove controlled Genophone
• Google search: glove based musical control

Other P5 Projects

• Roid's P5 community page
• Eric Lundquist managed to get Jason McMullan's libp5glove working on Windows by using the Windows version of libusb
• Michael Mandel developed a sword fighting game controlled by the P5 as part of his Motion Synthesis Research.
• Derrick Parkhurst has developed a P5 data collection application
• Andreas Schwarz has developed a wrapper for using the P5 glove with Delphi.

General P5 Development

• The primary source of information about the P5 glove is the developer discussion boards at the essential reality web site.
• You can sometimes find knowledgable people on the #p5 irc channel on blitzed.org
• Version 0.2 of Jason McMullan's (LGPLed) libp5glove for Linux. Jason's site has disappeared so here is a local mirror of libp5glove-0.2.tar.gz (168k).
• 10LEDTest (655k) Windows proprietary absolute mode test program from essential reality, courtesy of Roid from the essential reality discussion boards.
• Brian Bagnall's P5 Projects Page including pictorial guide to disassembling the P5 Glove.

Windows USB Development

• The HID FAQ HID is the USB profile for Human Interface Devices
• Alan Macek's Windows USB source code was very useful in working out how to communicate with the P5 on Windows.

Contacts

Simulus are Steve Adam, Ross Bencina and Tim Kreger. Ross is responsible for Windows development and can be contacted at rossb@audiomulch.com. Tim is responsible for Macintosh OS-X development.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jason McMullan for his support, and the libp5glove library which solves the complex problem of unpacking the USB data from the glove.

Thanks to Roid from the essential reality discussion boards who provided much insight into essential reality's business status, and who kindly provided the 10LEDtest program.

Simulus gratefully acknowledges the financial support of Arts Victoria.