Imogen Heap's music-manipulating gloves on Kickstarter

While the conversation around wearable tech is really only just getting started, Imogen Heap is ahead of the game by several years.

Heap's gestural Mi.Mu gloves, which she demoed at Wired 2012, allow her to play her music live on stage the same way she had previously only been able to do in a studio, using only her hands and arms.

Now, a year and a half later, Heap and the team have put the gloves on Kickstarter, with the aim of making them more widely available. The impetus for the campaign, Heap tells Wired.co.uk, was the reaction online after people saw her demoing the gloves on YouTube. "We got loads of emails and requests coming through the website asking us if we could make them a pair," she says. "We've been keeping a tally of people who've wanted to be involved and quickly realised that this wasn't just for me anymore -- this was something other people were wanting to get their hands on."

Over that period of time, the gloves have been redesigned and redeveloped multiple times in order to reduce the complexity of setup and use, so that any musician would be able to take advantage of them and adapt them to their own music. Everything the team has done since then has been focused on how to make the glove into a product others would genuinely be able to use and also a product they could afford. They also tried to find partners they could work with "to finetune it into a manufacturable glove".

"That's actually been the biggest thing that's been holding us back is trying to find a company that can do what we want to, and we haven't been able to find them," says Heap.

This is where the Kickstarter campaign comes in. While a key aim of the campaign is obviously to make the gloves more widely available to musicians that want to experiment with them, the money raised through the campaign will be used to finalise the design of the gloves and also work out how they can make the glove into "a tool that people can go to without worrying". "It's not actually very expensive at all for what it is, but it's much more expensive than we want it to be [currently a whopping £1,200 per glove]," Heap says. The plan is to try and reduce the cost of the gloves to the point where they might even be as cheap as "a keyboard and a mouse". "Freeing yourself up from the computer, and from the mouse and the keyboard when you're writing music is just something which just feels so fantastic."

Already the gloves have been refined from the product we first saw in action at Wired 2012. The biggest difference, Heap points out is that now "the gloves are contained". "You don't need all these wires connecting to the back hub, which is what I had, that sent Bluetooth information to the computer," Heap explains. The board that holds the accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer has now been integrated with Wi-Fi so it can send the signal directly. "That's really great because being able to roam around freely is so important to me."

There's a possibility, she adds, that they could make a cheaper version for people that perhaps didn't demand the same level of precision and functionality that the gloves currently offer, but that's still being debated right now. "My instinct is that I want to stick to a quality product, that's going to stand up to something I would use on stage," says Heap. "I wouldn't step out onto the stage unless I was absolutely convinced it was robust and it was really, really good."

The gloves have so far raised nearly £19,000 of their £200,000 Kickstarter target and have a whole 40 days left to go. You can support the project by donating as little as just £1, but if you want a glove of your own, you'll have to pledge at least £1,200, or £2,400 for the pair. If you're a musician or technologist who has been following closely the development of the Mi.Mu gloves, there's also the option of becoming a collaborator on the project. For this honour you'll pay a minimum of £4,950 and will in return receive a pair of prototype gloves, which will be upgraded at final release stage. "It's a lot to make this big story of the glove and the hardware and the software of the glove into a beautiful haiku, which is what we want in time," muses Heap. "These people are going to be joining us on this journey and helping us grow something that hopefully many, many thousands of people may use in the future."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK