Here is some of the technical information on this hack.

The fingers are actuated by a small hobby servo. I don't know the techincal details of this specific servo but it seemed to be a faily typical small servo. The servo arm is connected by twine through a series of braces to the fingertip. When this servo is actuated it pulls back on each finger opening the hand. All of this is hotglued to a work glove that can be worn.

For the demo at the hackathon we used a ping sensor to control the servo position. The closer the wearer moved their hand to the ping sensor, the more the hand was opened. But the idea is that any sort of sensor or data source could be used to drive the glove.

The servo and sensor were controlled by a Raspberry Pi running python. The control script can be found here: https://gist.github.com/jminardi/5022297

And the servo control library is part of this package I wrote for Raspi hardware control: https://github.com/jminardi/RobotBrain

TechCrunch interviewed me here, where you can see video of the glove in action: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/26/y-combinator-hardware-hackathon-winner/