The glove in the SudoGlove system contains flex, force, and vibration sensors, plus a 2D gyroscope on the wrist.

Here's one case where giving the finger while driving is a very good idea. The index finger, that is. Bending it makes the remote-controlled car in the SudoGlove system accelerate. Tilting your hand turns the car. Pressing your ring finger makes it go in reverse. Pinkie pressure turns on the headlights, siren lights, and siren sounds. Clapping honks the horn.

Jeremy Blum wears the glove and control module (click to enlarge).

The SudoGlove, designed and built by engineering students at Cornell University, allows wearers to control a modded RC car using hand gestures. But it has implications for any hardware containing a wireless transceiver, says Jeremy Blum, a Cornell junior majoring in electrical and computer engineering and one of the students who worked on the SudoGlove as a final project for an information science class.

"All the processing is done on the glove side of the system, and simple 8-bit control values are transmitted that can be used to do just about anything on the control end," Blum told CNET. Just the other night, Blum created a computer interface that can be controlled by the glove. He'll display it and the hand-controlled RC car at BOOM 2011, Cornell's technology and innovation showcase, on March 9.

But unlike other gestural gloves that can be used to control virtual objects, the SudoGlove (so named for the Sudo programming command) is aimed at bridging the gap between users and traditional hardware devices.

"By removing the distance between the user and traditional hardware devices," the students say, "our goal is for SudoGlove to feel more like an extension of the body as opposed to an external machine."

To make the SudoGlove, Blum and peers Joe Ballerini, Tiffany Ng, and Alex Garcia outfitted a standard RC car with an Arduino Pro Mini microcontroller and other electronics components.

An XBee wireless module receives commands from the glove, and an Arduino Pro Mini processes them and tells the reworked car what to do.

The tricked-out Reebok glove got a flex sensor, two force sensors, a vibration sensor, and a 2D gyroscope on the wrist. The glove sends data to a battery-operated control module worn on a belt holster.

In all, the project involved 250 hours of combined labor, 150 feet of wire, and 600 lines of code. Even in a world where technology increasingly bows to the will of motion, that might seem like a lot of work to go into a toy car. Then again, maybe it's a small price to pay if the simple bend of a finger drives all of our gadgets one day.

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Leslie Katz, senior editor of CNET's Crave, covers gadgets, games, and myriad other digital distractions. As a co-host of the recently retired CNET News Daily Podcast, she was sometimes known to channel Terry Gross and still uses her trained "podcast voice" to bully the speech recognition software on automated customer service lines. E-mail Leslie.