For those curious meta actually bought out a company that orginally pioneered this idea (wrist controller) from a company called CTRL+Labs in 2019. Here is a verge article that has some photos of the prototype from CTRL-Labs. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/6/17433516/ctrl-labs-brain-c...
Another company doing this (mentioned in the Verge article) was Thalmic Labs, a YC company from 2013, which was acquired by Google in 2020. I remember seeing their presentation at YC Demo Day and it was jaw-dropping stuff; one of the only demos I still remember, 12 years on.
It's sad to see they didn't make it as a commercial success, and is a grim reminder that brilliant innovation doesn't assure a successful outcome.
Pretty sure Thalmic sold the tech to CTRL+. I’ve still got one of the bands knocking around somewhere. It was cool tech, but really wasn’t ready for a product.
Thalmic then became North to make smart glasses and then got sold to Google
Why is this just now news? They already built a similar device for their Project Orion glasses. As far as I can tell, this is just the same thing but with a PC driver.
Having tried prototypes at neuroscience conferences where their team attended, I can tell you that the device was incredibly brittle (e.g. damp wrist, interference from even the metal table or a nearby computer).
As it says in the article, the device seems to be more robust, and ready for the market soon. After having used ML to tune the decoding model on many participants contributing EMG data.
You’re correct that this was publicly announced last fall along with Orion. This is back in the news now because of the recent Nature paper demonstrating the performance of general models on new participants without additional training data. It has nothing to do with PC drivers.
Was skeptical (especially because it's Meta) until it said it's designed for accessibility. Reminds me of the Xbox accessible controller. A lot of devices designed for accessible end up leading to cool user design discoveries.
https://archive.vn/9aDER
For those curious meta actually bought out a company that orginally pioneered this idea (wrist controller) from a company called CTRL+Labs in 2019. Here is a verge article that has some photos of the prototype from CTRL-Labs. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/6/17433516/ctrl-labs-brain-c...
https://archive.md/j0d78
Another company doing this (mentioned in the Verge article) was Thalmic Labs, a YC company from 2013, which was acquired by Google in 2020. I remember seeing their presentation at YC Demo Day and it was jaw-dropping stuff; one of the only demos I still remember, 12 years on.
It's sad to see they didn't make it as a commercial success, and is a grim reminder that brilliant innovation doesn't assure a successful outcome.
Pretty sure Thalmic sold the tech to CTRL+. I’ve still got one of the bands knocking around somewhere. It was cool tech, but really wasn’t ready for a product.
Thalmic then became North to make smart glasses and then got sold to Google
Very little info about its capability. How many distinct gestures does it have? Is it sophisticated enough to allow typing?
Why is this just now news? They already built a similar device for their Project Orion glasses. As far as I can tell, this is just the same thing but with a PC driver.
Having tried prototypes at neuroscience conferences where their team attended, I can tell you that the device was incredibly brittle (e.g. damp wrist, interference from even the metal table or a nearby computer).
As it says in the article, the device seems to be more robust, and ready for the market soon. After having used ML to tune the decoding model on many participants contributing EMG data.
You’re correct that this was publicly announced last fall along with Orion. This is back in the news now because of the recent Nature paper demonstrating the performance of general models on new participants without additional training data. It has nothing to do with PC drivers.
The paper was just published in Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w (the preprint was out almost 18 months ago)
Was skeptical (especially because it's Meta) until it said it's designed for accessibility. Reminds me of the Xbox accessible controller. A lot of devices designed for accessible end up leading to cool user design discoveries.
So I guess the Kinect has vanished from everyone's memory
As if I don't have bad enough RSI already. (Although a diverse repertoire of gestures might actually be better than repetitive taps)