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Comment by klik99 | Hacker News Reader

I believe the wristband came from this acquisition: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/23/20881032/facebook-ctrl-la...

Insanely cool, and awesome to see a viable wave guide device.

It's so cool that it might outweigh my reluctance to strap facebook to my face.

CTRL-Labs themselves acquired the wristband tech from North/Thalmic, who pivoted into smart glasses for a few years before being acquired by Google.

> In an interesting twist, CTRL-Labs purchased a series of patents earlier this year around the Myo armband, a gesture and motion control device developed by North, formerly known as Thalmic Labs. The Myo armband measured electromyography, or EEG, to translate muscle activity into gesture-related software inputs, but North moved on from the product and now makes a stylish pair of AR glasses known as Focals. It now appears the technology North developed may in some way make its way into a Focals competitor by way of CTRL-Labs.

nope. the technology was invented by CTRL-labs, and at Meta after the acquisition.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w

yes the Myo was a similar, earlier, and less capable technology also based on EMG sensing.

I had one of those Thalmic Myo armbands 12ish years ago. Used it a couple of times and then forgot about it. From memory, there were only a few gestures available to program, and anything I could think to sync them to was just as easily handled with keyboard shortcuts (show desktop, close window, change workspace, etc).

The technology was "invented" by CTRL-Labs like how OpenAI "invented" transformer-based language models.

Do you have any evidence or are you just going to go with repeating a bald-face lie?

lol you can go ask Thomas Rearden himself if Ctrl-labs "invented" gesture recognition from sEMG.

> measured electromyography, or EEG

Should be EMG, but is it normal EMG or sEMG?

surface!

Yes, it seems that the gesture detection is based on the raw time-frequency sEMG signals with data and code for model implementation from the Nature paper available here [1],[2].

[1] sEMG data:

https://fb-ctrl-oss.s3.amazonaws.com/generic-neuromotor-inte...

[2] Code for exploring surface electromyography (sEMG) data and training models associated with Reality Labs' paper:

https://github.com/facebookresearch/generic-neuromotor-inter...

That's not true. Thalmic did develop an sEMG band, but the tech developed here was created by Ctrl-labs and continued development within Meta.

Disney is about to have a serious talk with Facebook. Disney Research has had a prototype on gesture detection via wristband electric sensing tech since 2012: https://youtu.be/E4tYpXVTjxA?t=2m8s

not the same tech at all.

Besides it being different technology, the original Myo wristband was also introduced around 2012. The parents were later acquired by CTRL-labs which was then acquired by Meta. So you can be pretty confident that they have the patents.

Although surface electromyography is quite a bit older than that.

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