
Thalmic (YC W13) introduces gesture control without the cameras - pauldix
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23210-armband-adds-a-twitch-to-gesture-control.html
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dxbydt
Just amazing! Hardware startups are beyond sexy. There is something so
compelling about tactile devices... no amount of sophisticated software engg
can come close to that feeling. Wipro's chairman was once asked why wipro
still made soap & shampoos even though wipro was a billion dollar software
services shop. He just picked up a bar of soap and said - its just very
physical. Software, you can't touch, you can't see...

In the early 90s, there was this thing called a centronics port. You looked
behind an old dot matrix printer, you found this large ugly parallel port with
25 pins ( <http://bit.ly/YT4xRh> ). I asked my professor "how does the printer
print ? ". He took my question at face value, hooked up the centronics port to
a CRT...soon I realized pins 2-9 would output any goddamn digital signal !
Literally anything I wanted. I wrote a quickbasic program to print square
wave, sine wave sawtooth... and those waves started showing up on the CRT. So
it got me thinking...if I feed that 8 bit output to an 8-bit TI DAC, I can
make an analog function generator! ( <http://bit.ly/WmFy8o> ) My final version
needed a 741 op-amp & a 555 timer, but it actually worked over a wide range of
frequencies, and was about one hundredth the price of a real Kenwood function
generator! Ofcourse, back in those days, there was no YC or startup culture, &
that was the end of that device...:( But just thinking about that one hardware
device gives me more pleasure than all the software I wrote after graduating.

~~~
pierrebouchet
Yes hardware startup are sexy, but most of them are also very software-
intensive. Leap Motion needs a lot of processing power, even for a simple
visualizer app, and I bet Myo does too.

Other examples: guidance of things like the Sphero or the Parrot AR Drone are
very complex. Usually there's a lot of maths involved, which has to be
translated into software.

~~~
namank
I would think they just map muscle contractions to commands for the drones. No
math required except to parse contractions.

~~~
srlake
The math behind this is actually rather complex. Heavy duty machine learning
and statistical analysis.

~~~
namank
Well of course. But that's DSP for parsing the muscle contractions, right?

I would imagine you guys didn't do any application-specific math like guidance
of the choppers..? Just curious!

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Inufu
> The first generation can recognise around 20 gestures, some as subtle as the
> tap of a finger

I wonder if it's able to distinguish between fingers. If so, it would be
possible to create some sort of chorded keyboard, without the keyboard of
course. Combine with Project Glass and you have awesome sauce.

~~~
jgrahamc
_I wonder if it's able to distinguish between fingers_

From the FAQ (<https://getmyo.com/faq>):

"What sort of precision does the myo have?

The MYO senses gestures and movements in two ways: 1) muscle activity, and 2)
motion sensing. When sensing the muscle movements of the user, the device can
detect changes in hand gesture right down to each individual finger."

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TimMontague
I've worked extensively with sensored gloves in my job, both designing the
gloves, and developing software to do cool things with them. By far the most
difficult thing to do is make a compelling application that effectively
utilizes the capabilities of the hardware. This is a very cool piece of
hardware, but it's success is going to be defined on whether or not they are
able to make it better than existing input devices, which tend to be quite
good already.

~~~
namank
That was my first thought too. The video game shot made so much sense though.

Good luck to these guys, hope they make it into a massively big company.

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zmanian
I'm terribly excited about this interface. I've been hoping that this is right
path towards a Rainbow's End(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End>) kind
of interface.

I was worried that this kind of approach would languish inside MSFT research.
[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/133732-microsoft-demos-
mu...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/133732-microsoft-demos-muscle-
computer-interface-air-guitar-hero-now-a-reality)

Are you worried about the MSFT patent?

Having your arms hanging loosely or with the elbow support while gesturing
seems to be the right way to take advantage of human fine motor control while
manipulating a digital interface. It is a good workaround to Gorilla arm.

I suspect that the 20 year interface that Gabe Newell is expecting will use
this kind of input.

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/26/valve_considered_ton...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/26/valve_considered_tongue_controlled_interface/)

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jeremyt
This is cool, but I couldn't believe their video included the skiing example.
As an avid skier, I can't think of anything more life threateningly dangerous
than messing with menus to share a video while you're sliding down a mountain.

I get that it has nothing to do with armband itself, it just seems like a very
poor choice. I cringed.

~~~
drucken
It wasn't that cringeworthy!

The skier used it at the top of the run and once at the bottom of the run to
Share when the jump was complete.

Also, you should note if it works as well as is claimed, it would be every bit
as fast as every other gesture in the human body. So, its not like you're
fiddling with a touchscreen or mousepad while moving on mountain...

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abstractbill
I haven't been so excited in a startup's product in a very long time. I'm
constantly tapping out rhythms with my fingers - often quite pleasant and
complex ones - and for whatever reason I've never been able to do the same
onto any kind of midi device - a keyboard or a set of drum pads or whatever. I
would _love_ to give this a try as a midi controller!

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ChuckMcM
Ok, this is what I think we will see a lot of. No talking, no vision, no
touching, just some simple gestures.

Dave Rosenthal (former MIT/Sun/nVidia not archivist guy) and I talked a bit
about gesture control when the first MEMS accelerometers came out. They
allowed for a wide range of controls but they drifted horribly so it wasn't
possible to do a sort of "hold for fast forward" kind of motion. You had to
have a move to start and a move to end.

To some extent this is the same problem as the Leap which can know where your
fingers are but you can't hold a gesture and move your hand (afaict, I've not
seen the LEAP SDK in action yet)

~~~
DanielRibeiro
It is nice to see some competition to Leap Motion[1], which made into HN's
first page a few weeks ago[2].

Getting them integrated with Chrome/Firefox would be amazing.

[1] <https://www.leapmotion.com/>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5179335> and was not the first time:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4250536>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170446>

~~~
alok-g
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240089>

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dbh937
First thing something would do with this: integrate it with Google Glass.
While nodding your head or tapping a touchpad on the side by your temple might
be awkward, discretely swiping up and down with your had would be more natural
and less obvious.

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matb33
I wonder how well it can perform for amputees. I'm guessing there is HUGE
potential here, one that a Leap Motion simply can't compete with.

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justjimmy
Just a thought in this field of motion controls - could be cool to use
gloves/finger/points of contact tapping as part of the motion/gesture control
aspect - ie: tapping my thumb and forefinger together is 1 gesture, thumb and
middlefinger another, thumb and ringfinger etc. So on top of using motion and
speed, you also detect commands when points connect together.

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abrichr
Will you be offering the units for free to developers, like the Leap Motion,
or should I just pre-order right away?

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lukev
I wonder how good this can be at spatial accuracy. With optical motion
sensing, you can relate gestures to physical space: you can point _at_
something.

I love the concept here, but I wonder how it can go beyond "the user is
wagging their finger" to "the user is pointing at an object on the screen"

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josephpmay
Depending on the sensitivity of this, the potential is endless. There are many
multi-finger gestures that would work very well in three-dimensional space
that have not yet been exploited with current technology. I'm excited to see
what will come of this.

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klintcho
Just preordered one, if it's as good as it looks on the video the possibility
to build amazing things are endless. As stated in the the NewScientist
article, this combined with glass and some home control equip. Oh the future
is now ! :)

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purplelobster
I guess this could work well with Google Glass.

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drucken
Youtube video link of the MYO: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWu9TFJjHaM>

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_august
Wow, not only is the product amazing, but so is the naming.

The product uses EMG, as in electro _myo_ graphy. And it's a personal armband,
as in My 'O'.

~~~
e3pi
Good observation! I always like these minimalist signature loadings.

I like the logo too, I see it as some kind of trans-binary trans-bi-state non-
analog frequency peak-detector (0,1) state, not `ol tired familiar 0,1 on-off
switch. Something new!

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karamazov
This is awesome. The Kinect has a ton of great applications, and this looks
even better. I can't wait to play around with one.

~~~
morganwilde
This one indeed looks better, but the thing that caught my attention was their
vision of enabling humans to do more with computers, to enhance their
abilities (Finally no more of the BS that touch is the way forward...). I feel
this vision is going to be their killer app (eventually); and one of the best
ones to have come out of YC recently.

Best of luck!

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hnwh
this seems way cooler to me than the ones that use visual input.. looking
forward to the dev kit!

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brittohalloran
Amazing that I'm still thinking back to Minority Report over a decade later
(released in 2002!).

~~~
alecperkins
Given that the technology in that film was designed by actual interface
researchers, based on their research, it's no surprise that it continues to
resonate so well. Also, sci-fi does have a tendency to inspire, or at least be
inspired by, the leading edge of technology.

Said researchers now have a company, Oblong industries, that's basically
making the _Minority Report_ interface a reality: <http://oblong.com/>

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ihodes
Wow. This is the future of human/machine interface (until we get direct
brain/machine interfaces (BMI) working with fidelity and no/little
invasiveness). I really hope the actual product works as well and as smoothly
as in those demos.

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g2e
Can you ensure that common activities such as typing, writing, stretching etc.
won't be registered as intended triggers for actions? Anyway, amazing product!
I can totally see myself using and developing with one!

~~~
warfangle
From their faq[0], you have to perform an "unlock" style gesture to begin
input.

0\. <https://getmyo.com/faq>

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aashaykumar92
I wonder if they've looked into adding an NFC chip into MYO. It may seem crazy
for a gesture control armband but it could add potential functionality to the
armband and also improve communication among the masses.

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mdda
Very cool technology!

Honest question : Is this area a patent minefield? Or are the Myo guys busily
sewing it all up? (I'm glancing nervously at the may-be-more-tricky-than-
anticipated 3d printing field, for instance).

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e3pi
`k people, I wanna see a coupla-three dev teams getting these patent specs
sewn up before Myo flips behind Apple's iwatch wristband wall.

1\. Permute & Enumerate Discrete Associative Layer(PEDAL) Group. Enumerate all
normative ergo kenesiologic mapping of discrete hapt events onto an
associative array we can MTF onto task expectation frequencies.

2\. Dynamic Adaptive Nascent Cognitive Evolution(DANCE) Group. Get past the
AA(Acknowledgment Annunciator), transparently and simultaneously entrain both
user and device handshake onto evolving MTF surfacing situ specific command
completion.

3\. Comparitive Haptics Integral Nuance Advancement(CHINA) Team. Collide Leap,
Myo, Kinect, Oculi; onto mobile, glass, watch.

That's it. Git'er done like yesterday, fellas. Now!

Out!

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mindcruzer
Very cool.

Just a heads up: At the bottom of <https://getmyo.com/faq>, the
@ThalmicDeveloper <a> tag is being rendered as text.

~~~
srlake
Thanks, just took it out!

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e3pi
Does it suffer `Gorilla Arm' as others? Is it necessary to keep one's arm
aloft for hours to get in a day's work? It certainly looks exciting for
momentary input.

~~~
srlake
That's one of the advantages of the MYO: You arm can be at your side, on your
lap, an arm rest, etc. It doesn't need to be seen by a camera.

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redschell
I really hope these guys are in contact with the guys at Oculus. I feel like
we're finally at the cusp of some incredible VR technology.

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palidanx
black magic!

