P5 Glove:Mouse Mode Gaming

=Mouse Mode Gaming=

You can play any mouse game, such as modern First Person Shooters, by using the P5 Glove as a USB mouse. This allows you to hold up your hand like a gun (but don't bend your ring and index fingers or it won't move) and swing your arm left and right, up and down, to aim. And you can bend your trigger finger to shoot. The main [Games|P5 Enabled games] aren't much smarter than this anyway, so you aren't actually missing much by playing an un-enabled game this way. This will work in EVERY mouse game no-matter-what, because it is built into the hardware just like a real mouse.

Your arm will get tired doing this, but just imagine how much more tired it would get if you were holding up a real gun in front of you for several hours! Essential Reality recommend using a chair with arm-rests so you have something to hold your arm up.

Installing
By default the P5 glove will behave as a USB mouse when you plug it in to any computer. It does not use any drivers for this, except for the standard USB drivers and mouse drivers which should already be installed on your computer.

Calibrating the Bend Sensors
But before you can use the P5 glove properly in Mouse Mode, you need to calibrate the bend sensors. Calibration settings are stored in the glove hardware itself, so you can calibrate the glove on one computer and then plug it in to a different computer to use it. On the PC you can either install the driver that came with your P5 glove and use its Control Panel application, or you can download the Dual Mode Driver and use its VBControlPanel calibration program (which supports multiple gloves, and displays the configuration values numerically so you can duplicate them). Use the **Calibration** tab to calibrate the bend sensors and follow its instructions.

New Drivers Won't Effect Mouse Mode
Mouse Mode is built into the hardware, and it can't be changed. You can't use updated drivers to improve Mouse Mode, because Mouse Mode doesn't use drivers!

Mouse Mode Settings
You can change which fingers control which of three mouse buttons, how sensitive each button is, and how long the cursor position will remain frozen when you click (so you can double-click without the cursor moving between clicks). These settings are controlled from the **Mouse** tab of the P5 Control panel, or the VBControlPanel application (see above). You can also turn Mouse Mode on and off from this tab. Mouse Mode will be automatically turned on whenever you turn on the computer with the glove plugged in (but not when you restart the computer). Turning mouse mode off is not permanent.

The Unchangeable Pause Gesture
Bending the ring finger and the little finger (pinky) together will allow you to move your hand without moving the cursor. This is like lifting the mouse off the table when you get to the edge of the mouse-mat and putting it down on the other side. There is no setting to change this, or to disable this. If you suddenly find that the glove is not responding to your movements, you need to straighten your ring and/or little fingers. You may need to adjust the bend sensor calibration if the pause gesture keeps activating when you don't want it to. If you are really cunning then you can probably do the bend sensor calibration in such a way that the pause gesture will never be activated by regular finger bends (by not having the bend sensors attached to those fingers while calibrating, but rather bending them manually much further than your fingers can bend). But the Pause Gesture is actually useful, so you probably shouldn't try to disable it. The pause gesture only effects Mouse Mode.

Emulating or Enhancing Mouse Mode with Software
If mouse mode doesn't do everything you want, then you can either add features to it, or completely replace it, by using some form of software mouse emulation in addition to, or instead of, the hardware Mouse Mode.

The easiest way to do this on a Windows PC is with [PIE] (Programmable Input Emulator). For example, to add two extra mouse buttons in PIE, you can use these two lines in a PIE script:

Mouse.Button4 = P5.Ring > 32 Mouse.Button5 = P5.Pinky > 32

And/Or you could add mouse wheel support when you move the glove forwards and backwards like this:

Mouse.DirectInputZ = P5.Z

I haven't tried the above line, so you may need to multiply or divide by something to get the movement you want.

You could also map the buttons on the glove to keyboard keys like this:

Key.R = P5.ButtonA

I like using glove buttons for reloading, since this forces you to use a two-handed gesture like loading a real gun.

You could also try using rotation or gestures for various game features.

If you want to completely replace the hardware Mouse Mode, you can see much more complicated PIE scripts, such as the Doom3 one. Don't forget to turn Mouse Mode off when you want to replace it, and on when you want to add features to it.

For more about using emulation to control existing games, see [Other Games] or see [Control].