Ontario is quickly becoming leaders in transforming our bodies into remote controls. On Monday, Kitchener-based startup Thalmic Labs announced its gesture-controlled armband
Myo (yes that is a Star Wars reference) is available for pre-order. The armband is the company's experiment in seeing how it can "integrate technology into our daily lives and give people superpowers," Thalmic Labs co-founder Stephen Lake says in an interview with
New Scientist.
The armband works by reading "electrical activity in a user's muscles as they contract or relax to make gestures with their hand and arm," an article in New Scientist writes. Signals are submitted wirelessly to software that "interprets the movements into commands."
"we really have this belief that technology can be used to enhance our abilities," Lake says. "This is a way of using natural actions that we've evolved to intuitively control the digital world."
A
video demoing Myo's capabilities shows gamers using their bodies as first-person devices, corporate types and professors shifting through slides with the wave of an arm, and chefs scrolling through cooking instructions on their iPads, their chicken fingers far away from the screen. The armband will ship later this year and is expected to cost $149. The software is compatible with Apple and Windows platforms.
The software builds on pre-existing technology, the most common example being Kinect. However, Myo does not use camera sensor technology. Thalmic Labs also announced a developer's API, allowing use of the hardware to build additional applications. New Scientist writes the team is already imaging ways to integrate its technology with Google's Project Glass, something computer scientist Shahzad Malik, co-founder of Toronto's CognoVision, said would be huge.
"Something like Thalmic's technology is super useful since you can do interactions in a subtle way, which is important in a public venue," he says.
Read the full story
here.
Original Source: New Scientist