May the Force Be With You

You’ve seen the film Minority Report, where Tom Cruise is waving his hands around a virtual world to control everything around him? The Myo armband by Thalmic Labs brings that on-screen wizardry a step closer to reality. Myo might just revolutionize the way we interact with our technological environment.

Using electromyographic (EMG) sensors to recognize electrical signals pulsating through your forearm muscles, Myo can detect detailed data about your arm’s muscle activity. This allows the bracelet to identify whether you are clenching your fist in a ball, flicking your wrist, waving it from side to side, or a mixture of all of these gestures with motions.

Based on an ARM® Cortex®-M4 processor, Myo connects via Bluetooth®-enabled devices to provide gesture recognition in an endless possibility of ways. Myo can control music playback by swiping your hand to change a song, spreading your fingers can stop a song, while volume can be increased and decreased by the rotating a fist to the left and right. Myo enables presentations to become easier as slideshows can be controlled by flicking through slides while engagement is gained as presenters are able to zoom in and annotate to draw the audience’s attention to key points.

However, the most exciting opportunity for Myo armband is its ability to fit perfectly within the gaming industry as a replacement to a standard controller. Rather than sitting on the sofa with a plastic controller in your hand, users are able to feel part of the game as movements such as running, crouching, jumping are all mimicked on the screen while shoot ‘em up players can pretend to hold a gun, fire it and reload with all actions being shown in front of them.