Imogen Heap demonstrates latest version of Mi.Mu gloves

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Musician Imogen Heap is to put an experimental electronic glove into production, creating a tool that will allow anyone to interact with their computer remotely via hand gestures (+ interview + video).
Heap has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise £200,000 to develop and produce a limited production run of open-source Mi.Mu gloves, with a wider production planned for the future.
"Funding this campaign will enable us to make a really important developmental leap to finalise the gloves' design so they're ready to go into production," Heap said in a video accompanying her Kickstarter campaign.
Each gesture-control glove contains a range of sensors that track the position, direction and velocity of the wearer's hand, the degree of bend in their fingers and the distance between their fingers. It can also understand "postures" such as an open palm, a finger-point or a closed fist.
The resulting data is sent wirelessly to a computer, keyboard and other electronic music equipment, allowing musicians to create music by moving their hands rather than by playing a keyboard or pressing buttons.
"Fifty percent of a performance is racing around between various instruments and bits of technology on stage," Heap told Dezeen in an exclusive interview ahead of the Kickstarter launch. "I wanted to create something where I could manipulate my computer on the move wirelessly so that music becomes more like a dance rather than a robotic act like pressing a button or moving a fader."
The latest version of the gloves was developed as part of Heap's ongoing The Gloves Project, which began four years ago. In 2012 she performed with an early version of the gloves at the Wired 2012 conference.
While developed for musicians, Heap said the gloves could be "hacked" for other uses.
"I'm not claiming they're going to be the answer to every interaction with the computer but there's a lot of applications where it just feels wrong to use a mouse and a keyboard," she said. "You might want to be able to make something in some architecture software where you could stretch a building or draw little windows and quickly move them around like play-dough and maybe we'll get to the point where people will start to develop software like that."
She added: "It's essentially a remote control and anything that you could potentially do with your hands, you could do with your gloves."
The key piece of technology in each glove is an x-IMU board developed by x-IO Technologies, which is mounted on the back of the hand and contains an accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope and wifi transmitter. The latest version of the gloves features e-textile technology, where movement sensors are integrated into the fabric.