5 Of The Weirdest PC Accessories We Can’t Believe Actually Exist – SlashGear

Anyone who was a gamer in the early ’90s knew about Nintendo’s Power Glove. It was the single coolest-looking peripheral that had ever come out — all that potential, all that power … all that failure. You would think other companies would have learned from this. They did not.

Where the Power Glove basically took a Nintendo controller and slapped it on a glove, Iron Will Innovations and Y Studios used actual sensors embedded in its glove to read and understand hand movements.  When the Peregrine Gaming Glove was announced at E3 2009, people were intrigued. Preorders started a month after E3 in July for $99, and the glove sold at a $129 MSRP when it shipped that fall.

According to Y Studios, the Peregrine is a “wearable interface” best used for Real-Time Strategy (RTS) or Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games that could be used in conjunction with a keyboard, or replace it entirely. The glove was made of breathable fabric with a magnetic break-away connector, and could perform over 30 actions with your fingertips — and therein lies the problem.

The Peregrine wasn’t actually reading hand gestures because you had to interact with different TouchPoints (18 of them, to be exact) located on your fingers and palm. It was more or less like putting 18 buttons on a mouse.

Over the years, they’ve been developing a VR version of the glove, currently offered at a pre-release cost of $2,000. Iron will, indeed.