In September of 1982, a young engineer named Thomas Zimmerman filed a patent for an optical-flex sensor mounted inside a glove. The mitt would measure the yaw, pitch, and roll of its wearer's forearm and the bending of their fingers, a useful way to transpose a person's movement onto a screen. Seven years later, a commercial version known as the Power Glove launched for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The technology was simplified and styled to look like a knight's gauntlet, to which a video-game controller appeared to have been inelegantly glued. While wearing the glove, a player could throw a punch from the sofa, and watch it land in an explosion of pixels behind the television's glass.