Was skeptical (especially because it's Meta) until it said it's designed for accessibility. Reminds me of the Xbox accessible controller. A lot of devices designed for accessible end up leading to cool user design discoveries.
Why is this just now news? They already built a similar device for their Project Orion glasses. As far as I can tell, this is just the same thing but with a PC driver.
You’re correct that this was publicly announced last fall along with Orion. This is back in the news now because of the recent Nature paper demonstrating the performance of general models on new participants without additional training data. It has nothing to do with PC drivers.
For those curious meta actually bought out a company that orginally pioneered this idea (wrist controller) from a company called CTRL+Labs in 2019. Here is a verge article that has some photos of the prototype from CTRL-Labs. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/6/17433516/ctrl-labs-brain-c...
Another company doing this (mentioned in the Verge article) was Thalmic Labs, a YC company from 2013, which was acquired by Google in 2020. I remember seeing their presentation at YC Demo Day and it was jaw-dropping stuff; one of the only demos I still remember, 12 years on.
It's sad to see they didn't make it as a commercial success, and is a grim reminder that brilliant innovation doesn't assure a successful outcome.
From mine certainly. Funny how fast we forget about tech that was for years pretty common and then completely disappeared as it turned out be be a fad.
(I helped with their release and last month gave a presentation on the project's original research infrastructure, but I'm no longer on the team and I definitely never was allowed to talk about final products.)
I would say such inventions are as old as 30 years when i first heard of startups / inventors trying to do such stuff. Obviously the tech must be now much more mature. Still, it never got off back then because typing was magnitudes faster than what ever you could do with your hands alone. Learning to do such hand motions had a similiar fate as why alt keyboard layouts always stayed niche - most people have no patience to learn that complicated stuff when they already have learned something early on that works.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] threadAnother company doing this (mentioned in the Verge article) was Thalmic Labs, a YC company from 2013, which was acquired by Google in 2020. I remember seeing their presentation at YC Demo Day and it was jaw-dropping stuff; one of the only demos I still remember, 12 years on.
It's sad to see they didn't make it as a commercial success, and is a grim reminder that brilliant innovation doesn't assure a successful outcome.
https://github.com/facebookresearch/emg2pose
https://github.com/facebookresearch/emg2qwerty
Infer what you will.
(I helped with their release and last month gave a presentation on the project's original research infrastructure, but I'm no longer on the team and I definitely never was allowed to talk about final products.)