These Gloves Will Tweet When You Make the Hashtag Symbol with Your Hands
Just in time for the cold winter months and the holidays (hint, hint), a group of local college kids came up with a killer idea that’ll let you tweet and keep warm hands.
Hashtag Gloves, your favorite new garments, are voice-activated gloves that post to Twitter whenever the wearer makes the hashtag symbol with his or her hands. The gloves were made by Keenan Zucker, Byron Wasti, Andrew Deaver, and Patrick Huston—a group of 18 year-old guys from Olin College of Egineering in Needham. These dudes:
We ready. We in this. We gloves. @HackHolyoke #gloves pic.twitter.com/VcR0cAD3ND
— Hashtag Glove (@HashtagGlove) November 8, 2014
The team first submitted Hashtag Gloves at a computer programming hackathon called HackHolyoke, hosted by Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. HackHolyoke was their first real hackathon, Zucker told us, so they weren’t sure what to expect. In the video above, the team is seen demonstrating how the gloves work with the hand motions and Twitter.
“We recognized that wearable technology is rising in popularity, but we wanted to do something that hadn’t been explored before,” Zucker wrote us via e-mail. “We knew we could use Twitter’s open source API and the Google Voice API for the voice recognition so we figured we could have a reasonable amount of success combining those two in making the gloves.”
Tech talk aside, the idea for these gloves, of course, was inspired by Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake’s famous ‘#Hashtag’ sketch from The Tonight Show.
As for what’s to come of the gloves, Zucker hopes to continue to work and develop the idea with wireless capability, and possibly submitting to tech fairs—but it’s just a matter of finding time to do so. The guys are still 18 year-old students, after all.
“It’s been a really fun couple of weeks!” Zucker said.
#Undoubtedly
