MYO: New play in body sense, bio-electric induction

What is the best human-computer interaction? The author thinks that it is the interactive activities tending to the natural behavior of the human body, such as the normal hand holding, pinching, or eye gaze, overlooking and so on.

He Yi in the previous blog has introduced Google Glass, Xbox Kinect, Leap Motion and other human-computer interaction devices, they represent a future direction, let man-machine interaction more humane.

MYO: New play in body sense, bio-electric induction

MYO is an intelligent device that is closer to the natural behavior of the human body. MYO Arm Ring due to the well-known incubator Y Combinator's Canadian company Thalmic Labs production, is the company created the first product. Compared with Google Glass, Xbox Kinect, Leap Motion, which uses human-computer interactive devices to identify user actions through the camera, myo a different path, by detecting the changes in the bio-electricity generated by the muscles on the arm when the user moves, and by monitoring the physical movements of the arms to make human-computer interaction. The basic principle of MYO is that the sensor on the arm can capture the changes in the electrical activity of the user's arm muscles, thus determining the wearer's intent and then sending the results of the computer processing to the controlled device via Bluetooth. Myo is connected to smart devices via Bluetooth, and now supports Mac OS and Windows, and will launch an API with IOS and Android in the future for developers to tinker with a variety of interesting things.

MYO said on the official web, wrist strap to the speed of the capture of gestures is very fast, sometimes you even feel that your hand has not started moving MYO already feel. This is because your fingers begin to move before the muscles are activated and start moving. Compared to the Kinect and leap Motion, MYO has the advantage of being free from specific venues and more natural when interacting, but probably not as good as Leap Motion in precision and gesture richness. Its wearable features make the MYO Mobile field a significant advantage, such as interaction with Google Glass.

It is reported that MYO can now book a price of 149 U.S. dollars, is expected to start shipping at the end of this year. Interested friends may wish to pay attention.

About Thalmic Labs

Thalmic Labs was created by three people from Allen Grant (Aaron Grant), Matthew Bailey (Matthew Bailey) and Stephen Lache (Stephen Lake), who graduated from the University of Waterloo in Canada. Soon after graduating, the three of them began to collaborate on the development of the technology used in the MYO arm ring. Thalmic Lab currently employs 11 people.

"We were interested in wearable computing before we graduated," he said in an interview. "According to him, the Thalmic Lab team found that there was a basket of studies involving the head-display technology (which Google glasses used), but there were few technical studies on the control of wearable computing equipment, so they decided to get involved in the field.

The MYO arm ring is the first product created by Thalmic Lab, which uses a series of sensor and machine learning techniques to allow the forearm muscles to determine what information the user transmits with gestures. Once confirmed, the user can complete operations that appear on different device screens.

Thalmic Lab's vision is to build a platform that allows others to develop their own applications based on MYO gesture control. "We are really interested in working with third-party developers," says Clarke. Everyone who has communicated with us has different views on the use of MYO arm rings. ”