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?
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!
Your comment reminded me of a (terrible) movie I watched as a kid that was set in a dystopian future. Here's an awkward scene where a girl tries to borrow another persons hand (a ring on the thumb and pinky are the earpiece and mic) to make a phone call:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jR5XzEjeCA&hl=en#t=1126
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.
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!
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..
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
19 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 49.0 ms ] threadIs 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?
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!
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..
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.
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.