If you think this looks ugly, you should've seen our very first version. Let's just say they don't teach tailoring in an engineering curriculum :P We actually outsourced this to a seamstress, who was able to fabricate the glove from ground up with conductive threads sewn in.
I think Nintendo was kind of ahead of its time when they released the PowerGlove. I definitely see the merit of a wearable interface today with better batteries and wireless communication technologies. I think Google agrees. The challenge will be how to make it as unobtrusive as possible.
The way it works is actually really simple. The thumb pad is powered, and when it touches the other points, closed circuits are formed. And depending on which pad is touched, a different voltage value is read by the microcontroller, which then runs our code and translates the value to an ASCII character, which is then sent through Bluetooth to the computer/phone screen.
The first thing I thought when I saw the page was "that's one ugly glove" - but I'm sure a commercial version would be much different.
This also gave me flashbacks to the PowerGlove for NES, which only worked in that Fred Savage movie about Super Mario 3.