VR Gloves: Where air guitar meets a Nintendo flop, meets the future of remote surgery

07/12/22 • 25 min

When you think of virtual reality, your next thought is probably gaming. And while it’s certainly a mainstay in the gaming industry, VR has more applications than you realize. In this episode, Tom Zimmerman remembers how his love for air guitar spawned the development of his groundbreaking VR technology that would morph into the Nintendo Power Glove. Then Bob Crockett tells the story of how a college dropout convinced him to start a VR company that could one day transform healthcare.

Previous Episode

Introducing Ahead of Its Time

Welcome to a new show about the tech underdogs no one realized would shape the future. You'll explore the forgotten origins of today’s most transformative technology and relive the eureka moments of the people who first imagined it. Discover why these inventors struggled to get their ideas off the ground and meet the next generation of innovators building on the work of the tech pioneers who came before them.

Next Episode

Digital Cameras: How Kodak’s blunder and the camera on a computer chip could help us see further into space

If you want a taste of just how profoundly the digital age changed photography, consider this: more pictures will be taken worldwide in the next two minutes, than were taken during the first 150 years of photography. In this episode, Steven Sasson remembers how he tinkered with a weird new image sensing technology called CCDs to invent the world's first digital camera. Then we’ll hear from his good friend Eric Fossum who explains how he miniaturized that technology to help NASA explore the solar system.