Tech
Halfway to Iron Man: Hands On With the Myo Motion Control Armband
Image: Thalmic Labs
It’s as easy to put on as a traditional armband, but is packed full of technology that lets it track both your hand movements and arm motions, then lets you use those gestures to control virtually anything on your desktop, laptop or smartphone. It's a lot like Iron Man Tony Stark's gesture-controlled holo-computer, but without the super-cool imagery.
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Myo sounded exciting
and when Thalmic Labs unveiled its first demonstration video last year.
It garnered a lot of buzz, especially around the idea that it might
give you Jedi-like control over computers.These days, Thalmic CEO and cofounder Stephen Lake doesn’t don’t mention the “J” word (a certain mouse-ear-wearing company put the kibosh on that), but the device itself is, in fact, now even more impressive than it was when the company started accepting preorders in 2013.
Image: Thalmic Labs
The Myo comes in elegant plastic packaging and is thinner (11.5 mm), lighter (93 grams) and much sharper-looking than the prototype. Its figure-eight style rubberized, flexible-plastic band is actually filled with electronics; it is molded inside via a proprietary process. That material also holds all the sensors — rectangular blocks with black fronts and stainless steel sensors on the back — in place. All these components make contact with your body to read arm and muscle movement.
Myo communicates with your computer via Bluetooth 4.0 and can reportedly run up to two days on a charge. It’s also designed to handle any sweat on your arms, but we advise against dousing it with water.
I tried out a finalized model that was running some nearly-production ready software (in the device and on the paired laptop), and here's what I learned.
Getting started
I slid Myo up my forearm until it was snug around the widest part.Myo requires almost zero training. There is one two-part gesture necessary to show the device and software how you move your hand, fingers and forearm. The companion desktop app offers on-screen guidance that helps you learn this one gesture and then practice the relatively small list of gestures you’ll eventually use to control applications.
At first, I had trouble mastering this gesture. You have to put your arm at sort of a right angle, extend your fingers, bend your hand toward the right and then gesture or wave with your forearm to the right. I kept messing it up, but eventually, I got it right and followed the on-screen motion control tutorial.
The gestures were simple: bend my open hand left or right, sweep my forearm left or right, spread out my fingers, clench into a fist and press my thumb against my pinky.
That last gesture is critical, because it’s how I wake up Myo and put it to sleep.
If the arm band is asleep, I press those fingers together to wake it before using another gesture. In one instance, this is how I controlled a Keynote presentation. I would wake Myo, wave my arm to the right or left to change slides and then, because Myo was set to sleep after two seconds, wake it up again to gesture to the next slide.If the arm band is asleep, I press those fingers together to wake it before using another gesture.
The more I did all this, the more adept I became at all kinds of gestures. One of my favorites was the demonstration where I turned on Myo, clenched my fist and then slowly turned my hand one way or the other to control the temperature of an on-screen thermostat.
Within 10 minutes, my gesture control skill had increased exponentially. I was better at the initial move and all other gestures. Myo: mastered.
Image: Thalmic Labs
Since there is virtually no latency between movement and recognition on-screen,
Myo is also apparently quite popular with the Oculus Rift crowd. They like to wear one on each arm for a fully-immersive gaming experience where they control the virtual reality gaming action with arm gestures and hand movements. If, for example, you position your hands so you’re holding a virtual gun and pulling a virtual trigger, Myo will sense the arm and muscle movements and send that information right to your game. Your on-screen avatar will be aiming and shooting a gun.Myo is also apparently quite popular with the Oculus Rift crowd.
My 15 minutes with Myo convinced me that all this gesture control arm band needs to complete the Tony Stark picture is an awesome holographic display. J.A.R.V.I.S., please get on that.
Myos arrive in September from Thalmic for $199.
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