Gestura
Your hands are the controller.
At our first hackathon, we built two wearable gloves that turn hand movement and finger touches into game controls. We tested them in Minecraft and won Best Beginner Hack at Hack the North.
Winners of Aramco Americas: Best Beginner Hack
Chosen from all beginner teams at Hack the North for our wearable motion-control gloves.
Playing Minecraft with hand movement and finger-touch controls at Hack the North.
Left glove: movement
Tilt your left hand to move forward, backward, left, or right. The glove reads your hand's orientation and turns it into movement in Minecraft.
Right glove: camera and actions
Motion and rotation control the camera and physical actions, while finger touch sensors add inputs for interacting, placing blocks, and switching items. You can even hold a plain plastic sword and swing it to attack.
Two gloves. One weekend.
Each wearable controller uses an ESP32-S3 and an IMU. Touch sensors on the right glove add finger inputs. We filter noisy motion data, tune sensitivity and dead zones, then turn the signals into keyboard and mouse commands with as little delay as possible.
The idea started as a sensor you could attach to any object. While experimenting, we realized our hands were already the most natural controller.
Making motion feel intentional
Sensor data was the easy part. We had to calibrate the IMUs, keep finger touches from firing by accident, and stop ordinary movements from turning into game actions. Even a little latency made the controls feel wrong.
Building through setbacks
A battery short damaged our holder mid-build. We checked the wiring, rebuilt the power connection, and kept going. Getting a working physical controller together as two high-school students at our first hackathon made the award especially meaningful.