From: Eric Davies <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 12:11:20 -0400

Subject: standards and alternative position tracking schemes

One thought on standards: while the powerglove only gives you data about a
  finger as a whole, I would expect more sophisticated gloves (if not now,
  then in the future) to offer information about individual finger joints.
  [Allowing sign language, more involved puppetry?]
  Likely there are other options envisionable as well. Perhaps we could have
  a device driver which we pass a set of atoms (to use the Xwindows 
  terminology) to indicate which data items we are interested in and a buffer
  to store that information in. Data items that aren't supported by the driver
  are simply ignored. When the buffer got filled, the device driver
  would store the atom next to the data item to identify it. 
  Ideally, access to the driver would be a set of machine specific routines,
  to hide whether the driver was a library being linked in or a genuine 
  honest-to-goodness device driver.
  Given somebody/group willing to coordinate the allocation of atom values,
  (the way Commodore coordinates IFF chunk names) integer atoms should be
  sufficient.

Position tracking schemes: does anybody have any references to infrared
  position tracking schemes? It looks like you need to solve a nonlinear
  system of equations, making the math a bit uglier and probably slower,
  but removes a few other constraints.

Eric Davies