

Magic in a Box: My First Day Using Myo - zerotolerance
https://medium.com/@allingeek/magic-in-a-box-my-first-day-using-myo-aded707c2042

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necubi
I have a Myo as well, and it's pretty disappointing. The gestures are so
rarely recognized correctly for me (maybe 20% of the time for the fist, pinky
to thumb and open palm) that it's always easier to do the action another way.
Other people have much better luck, so it may just be limitations in their
training data (also, there's no way to train the classifier for your
particular body, so you're currently stuck with averages).

But the real disappointment is that there's no access in the SDK to the raw
EMG data. This means that as a developer, you only have access to the (in my
case useless) gestures and the accelerometer data, which can be captured by
much smaller and cheaper devices.

I'm hoping that Myo will open up their data sources, or at least improve
gesture recognition. Right now it's pretty useless as a developer device.

~~~
srlake
What were you hoping to do with the raw EMG data?

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vamin
Well, for one thing, he could train a classifier that works for his particular
physiology.

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miahi
What is this trend of writing a lot of words about a _new_ product without
ever _saying what it is_? Am I supposed to already know all the strange, early
brands that just released a developer kit? At least this article is linking to
the Myo web page at the beginning (that means a context-switch, maybe I'll not
even bother returning), and the Myo page actually says what it does (many
presentation pages just have a catchy phrase like "it changes everything"
without bothering to tell _what_ it is).

~~~
sytelus
Even worse the format of article was just unbearable. Such a long article with
distracting background and in your face giant images. My reaction was to keep
scrolling to get gist of it and in about 20 seconds I lost interest and moved
on to see comments on HN to get summary. Now I get it that it's hand gesture
device but I already have a feel that article was marketing piece so let's
move on.

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adt2bt
I never heard of a Myo before this article. However, I am extremely intrigued!
The idea of magically waving my hand and doing actions is awesome. What if I
can make a fist to take a picture, or touch my pinky with my thumb to answer a
phone call?

Is there any chance there's some "killer app" that finds a special use case
that dramatically unlocks some potential in people to get stuff done faster,
or easier, with a Myo? Can anyone think of one?

~~~
zerotolerance
There are a bunch in the works. The dev kits just started shipping but alpha
versions have been in the hands of some awesome people for quite a while. The
next few months should be loads of fun!

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sdrothrock
I'm surprised the Myo doesn't have default actions for various finger flicks
or wags. If I could flick to scroll up and down pages or zoom in/out, then
make a fist to close, that would be incredibly useful for something like using
a TV.

Edit: Another really cool thing would be if you could put it on your thigh and
use toe movements as input. Four myos for four discrete types of control!

Edit 2: How about something around the neck? It could be a huge step in
enabling people with certain types of disabilities to control things more
precisely.

~~~
zerotolerance
There are more coming. This is some beta and dev kit level stuff. I know there
are already some Chrome plugins for browsing.

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billycoover
I never heard of this until just now and this is my good friend that wrote the
post.

It reminds me of Halo from the show Continuum. The early alpha version before
it gets deeply integrated into your physical being.

Fast-forward 10 years and we'll be wearing these things, only they'll be
called iBod and it will be a combination iWatch and iGlasses and freakishly
integrated in our lives.

Ready Player One!

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DanFeldman
We got to play around with these at CalHacks last weekend, the winning hack
was actually a Myo controlled drone, if I recall correctly. Really cool stuff!

~~~
jonalmeida
We hand a drone project at Hack The North that we wanted to use with the Myo,
but all of us were using Linux machines and they only had support for Mac OS
and Windows.

We stuck with a Leap Motion, although we wasted too much time trying to get
the Myo to work (VMs and python wrappers) we didn't get to finish our hack in
the end..

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Kiro
I only skimmed it but did he ever say what he was using it for? It seemed to
focus more on how it feels to wear than the utility.

~~~
zerotolerance
Since its so early stage, there aren't many applications released yet. So, I
figured I'd focus on the device itself and wait to have more data before
tackling the uses.

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tempodox
What's this even about? And calling it “magic” only raises anticipations of
hot air painted pink. Medium looks more & more like a collection of useless
marketing fluff.

~~~
billycoover
I had the same question "What's this even about?" but I decided to read the
article and magically my question was answered.

