Google receives patent for Android-powered Smart Glove

In Minority Report, Tom Cruise uses special gloves to interact with a massive virtual computer display. The effect is as cool (if not as realistic-looking) today as it was back in 2002. Fortunately for tech-savvy consumers, Google has recently been awarded a patent for something industry insiders are already calling a “Smart Glove.”

Details about the Smart Glove are non-existent at this point. In fact, it’s probably not going to be called the Smart Glove at all, that’s just a catchy name that some people are using to describe the device thus far. However, some have speculated that the gloves could be used to interact with various types of displays, or to create holographic images on virtual displays. In any case, the Smart Glove sounds like something built for the future. Since the patent has only recently been filed and accepted, nobody knows how far off the Glove is at this point. It could be two years away, or some Google engineer might have just drawn a few sketches of a special glove and we might not see it for a decade or more – if at all. Google’s much-publicized Project Glass – which used Android-powered eyewear to do all sorts of neat tricks – might not be its only augmented reality project. Regardless, the Smart Glove is a cool development that has the potential to start appearing on consumers’ hands sometime in the near future. We can only dream about the potential of combining Project Glass with Smart Glove. Pretty soon, we might not know what is real and what is going on inside our heads. Now THAT sounds like a concept Hollywood could wrap its head around.